• Interviews

• All
• Music
• Cinema
• TV
• Comic Books

Mar 25, 2025 Web Exclusive By Austin Saalman Photography by Pak Bae

“I saw a painting of a woman, head down on a table, collapsed from melancholy,” remarks indie pop visionary and bestselling author Michelle Zauner of the influence behind Japanese Breakfast’s fourth album For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women). “After that I discovered there is this whole trope in painting, especially in the 19th century, of women collapsed from sadness. I thought that was really fitting.”

Indeed, the record’s wistfully dreamlike atmosphere reflects a certain “painted” quality complemented by its cover art, which depicts Zauner, face hidden, in the role of a collapsed melancholy brunette. In many senses, Zauner has always written and composed with a painterly eye, her soundscapes rich in various textures, interlaced with vivid hues and delirious contrast. This tendency toward higher art has never felt more apparent than on For Melancholy Brunettes, which boasts some of Zauner’s most spiritually inspired and intimately rendered musical efforts to date. For Melancholy Brunettes is an album of opposites and returns—an approach crucial to Zauner—and ultimately, daring aesthetic defiance, a bold reclamation of the creative self in the aftermath of the popular recognition she enjoyed upon the success of 2021’s Grammy-nominated Jubilee, as well as her bestselling memoir Crying in H Mart.

“I always want to explore the opposite thing, sort of a response to what I did before,” Zauner elaborates upon For Melancholy Brunettes’ shift in artistic direction. “For Jubilee, for instance, because Soft Sounds from Another Planet, Psychopomp, and Crying in H Mart were so rooted around grief, I think I wanted to surprise people and myself by writing an album about joy. And then after doing that, I got really sick of it [laughs], and found myself wanting to return to melancholy—which, you know, is quite different from grief or I think even sadness. I think it’s probably my natural resting state and a prominent feeling that I have at this point in my life.

“I knew I wanted the album both visually and sonically to have a ‘darker’ palette. In the Jubilee cycle we were doing a lot of larger arrangements with strings and horns and there wasn’t really space for me to play guitar a lot of the time—I was just being this frontman and felt uncomfortable there after a while, or maybe even from the beginning. And so, I knew I wanted to have an album that also was really centered around guitar music and to return to that. So that was the headspace that I was in. I’d originally wanted to make a ‘creepy’ album because I thought that that was a really interesting prompt, but, like other albums before it, I found that to be maybe a little too restrictive and so it broadened up into this theme of melancholy.”

This in mind, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) successfully places itself among the ranks of past pivotal fourth albums released in the wake of acclaimed, career-defining masterworks. Such releases—think Radiohead’s Kid A, Björk’s Vespertine, Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore—have often sought to scale back the bombast and complexities of their popular predecessors, allowing for the artist to develop a sense of autonomy independent of the popular culture that has “made” them, and challenge listeners accordingly. Zauner readily acknowledges the significance of an artist’s fourth record, especially in relation to her own.

“I’m always really obsessed with what a band’s discography says about their career. And so, for Kid A in particular, I’ve always thought of the fourth album as the ‘arts’ record… I feel like Kid A was the model for the headspace I was operating in, ‘cause that’s [Radiohead’s] fourth album and kind of their ‘difficult,’ arty record. Then for Björk, it’s Vespertine, which I also feel influenced by because it was sort of her ‘quiet’ album after this really bombastic one [1997’s Homogenic]. I was really fascinated with the power that something quiet could have. I also love how thoughtful she is in everything that she does, even down to the kind of venues that she wanted to perform in for that album was really inspiring to me for this record, because I definitely wanted to be in sort of smaller theaters. It was cool to me to see that artists can have power and conscientiousness even about that mundane stuff.”

Though For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) largely eschews much of the overt creepiness Zauner had initially envisioned, eerie undercurrents run throughout the album, each track swept with a certain shadow—one often cast by the looming specter of Death. A seasoned writer whose literary influences rival her musical ones, and to whom mortality is no stranger, Zauner is well-equipped to tackle such topics. Throughout the album, she uses the artist—specifically the poet—as a mortal avatar to address such pressing existential concerns. Accordingly, it is crucial to view her output through a writerly lens, as much of her work, especially on Brunettes, is so heavily informed by her various literary predilections.

“I would say my favorite period of making a record is the year before I even start writing, where I’m just sort of collecting inspiration, reading a lot, and trying to curate what I’m reading to what I want to write about,” reflects Zauner, who has previously expressed fondness for the works of such authors as Joan Didion, Philip Roth, and John Updike. “I made this discovery recently during an interview actually: When I’m writing a book, I read a lot, to the point where, if I’m trying to make a scene or something where someone is having a conversation with someone and they’re realizing something about themself but they’re not saying it out loud, I will try to find a book where someone is doing that and see how they’re doing it—kind of surgically—and figure out how to do that for myself.

“But I don’t ever do that with music. I never prepare for a record by listening to a lot of music. If I’m trying to accomplish something sonically, I’m very rarely thinking of references, because I’m so afraid of mimicking it too closely, in this way I don’t feel at risk with reading. So, I tend to read a lot before making a record, and I think especially for this record, but honestly for most of my records, it’s very influenced by what I’m reading.

“I read a lot in 2023,” she says of For Melancholy Brunettes’ immediate literary influences, “Because I knew I wanted to go in this ‘creepy’ direction, I was trying to read a lot of gothic fiction. I think because I went to an international high school program, I may have missed out on a lot of classics, so I never read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, or Jane Eyre. Those three books, I think, were trying to get me into this darker, gloomy landscape, so I was reading that. I was also going to Switzerland and my husband’s favorite book is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. He has talked about that from the beginning of our relationship and so us going to Switzerland was the catalyst that led me to finally take that on, because it’s quite a hefty book.”

She adds, “2023 was a year of me taking on really big books, because I also started that year with Infinite Jest, to just be annoying, and so after reading [that], I was like, ‘I have this ability to read really long books now—I’m gonna take on Magic Mountain,’ and I loved it so much. I think that staying with books that are maybe over 600 or 700 pages impacts your personality more than reading something a little bit shorter. It sticks with you longer and there’s a reason for that length.

So, I think [The Magic Mountain] stuck with me a lot and weirdly, that protagonist, Hans Castorp, is one of my favorite literary characters of all time. The character that I think of when I think of ‘Orlando in Love’ has that kind of air about him—he’s a bougie, sort of foolish, very impressionable young poet and that was almost the avatar for this record. This was the reason I wanted to come out with ‘Orlando’ [as the album’s first single], which I think some people found confusing because it’s maybe not my strongest or most memorable [musical offering]. Like, there’s no repeating sections really and it’s sort of weird. It’s a very delicate, lighter fare. For me, I’ve always felt that the world feels represented by this avatar of ‘Orlando in Love,’ which I think was very inspired by the protagonist of The Magic Mountain.”

Zauner intends to extend the album’s overall aesthetic to Japanese Breakfast’s upcoming performances, which she hopes will embody For Melancholy Brunettes’ tragically romantic and subtly experimental nature.

“I’m really excited about the shows and the tour—we’re gonna put something really special together. I think because this album feels so intimate, vulnerable, contemplative, and very analog, I wanted to bring that out in the stage production and so we’re doing kind of like theatrical set pieces—I really want it to feel like high art. I’m looking forward to promoting the tour and hope that people will come. We’re kind of leaning into the ‘Orlando in Love’ world and so it will almost feel like we’re putting on a little play.

“I really hope that it’s just a very intimate, beautiful, and moving experience. Though it’s going to be a fun show, I want it to be moving in a different way. Jubilee was so much about joy and exuberance, and I think this is just more thoughtful. I hope that there are enough people interested in having that experience right now.”

For Melancholy Brunettes’ literary heft, as well as its stylistic and thematic divergence from what may be expected of Zauner for a follow-up to Jubilee, make it a remarkably unique artistic effort, one which will doubtless speak to the same cohort of tragic artists, doomed poets, and lovesick outsiders populating its ten phenomenal tracks.

“I think it needs to find its own audience,” Zauner concludes. “Because it’s certainly less shiny than Jubilee and it’s a record that maybe needs a few listens to connect with. I hope that people have the kind of patience for it, which is maybe rare these days,” she says, laughing. “It’s a record that’s not for everyone, and I really wasn’t interested in making one of those. I think that once it comes out, maybe the response will be uncomfortable for me at first, and then I’ll realize that was exactly what I set out to do.”

www.japanesebreakfast.com

www.michellezauner.com

Also read our 2017 interview with Japanese Breakfast on Soft Sounds From Another Planet.

Subscribe to Under the Radar’s print magazine.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.