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Mar 20, 2025 Web Exclusive By Austin Saalman

In seemingly natural response to the breakthrough success of both 2021’s Grammy-nominated Jubilee and her bestselling memoir Crying in H Mart, multitalented indie pop visionary Michelle Zauner (aka Japanese Breakfast) has crafted a remarkably enchanting and utterly intoxicating “comedown” record. In the tradition of Radiohead’s Kid A, Björk’s Vespertine, Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) ranks among such pivotal fourth albums released in the spectacular wake of major, career-defining masterpieces. Scaling back Jubilee’s luminous bombast in favor of a nocturnally subdued sonic and thematic palette, For Melancholy Brunettes shifts its focus from its predecessor’s themes of recovery, redemption, and joy, finding Zauner and her band exploring instead what she considers “the artist’s condition”—melancholia. Indeed, the album’s 10 tracks—or more accurately perhaps, character studies—find various wistful dreamers victimized by their own poetic follies, suffering alienation, loss, and heartache as they slowly submerge themselves beneath the inky waters of the twilit soul, living for beauty, dying of love.

A pensive journey through the poet’s deep and watery midnight, For Melancholy Brunettes is an intimately-rendered artistic testament—Zauner’s personal Anatomy of Melancholy. Unlike Robert Burton before her, however, Zauner eschews any attempt to analyze or diagnose the condition, opting instead to observe and depict it as an inevitable phenomenon inherent to creatives such as herself. Though the album’s atmosphere often feels romantic in a hushed manner, many of its lyrical portrayals double as grim cautionary tales of the—so often male—artist’s tendency toward naiveté and self-destruction in the name of beauty and idealism. Accordingly, and given Zauner’s background as a successful writer as well as the album’s various references to great poets and novelists, it is crucial to view For Melancholy Brunettes with a literary sensibility. The album serves ultimately as the intersection of Zauner’s musical expertise and writerly ambition—and what an astounding vision it is.

The moodily baroque lilt of “Here Is Someone” opens the album on a dreamily dour note as Zauner sings, “While last night’s drinks / Bring on your morning tremors / And I’ll run my guts / Back through the spoke again.” Zauner presents us with a hazy portrait of disenchantment—“Life is sad but someone is here”—and nostalgic pining—“Measure by measure / In time with the songs we loved”—painted in such striking shades of blue and grey, its visceral impact as intricate as the music’s twinklingly plucky composition. At this point, the listener enters Zauner’s moonlit dreamscape, its often-cryptic symbolism steeped in classical mythology and painted by strokes of a deliriously Romantic brush. This is especially evident on the subsequent “Orlando in Love,” which stands as one of Zauner’s finest musical offerings to date. Here, the titular seaside poet, for whose character Zauner borrowed inspiration from Thomas Mann’s classic tome The Magic Mountain, finds himself seduced then drowned shortly thereafter. His fate, however, arrives less as a result of his encounter with the dazzlingly Venusian siren who emerges from the waves than his own trite tendency toward romanticization of his “ideal woman.” The theme of drowning is continued on glimmering dream pop number “Honey Water,” which finds Zauner assuming the guise of a desperately romantic narrator whose man is continually lured away from her by “rapturous sweet temptations” in which he soon sinks to his presumed demise. Similarly, the long-suffering narrator of the irresistible “Mega Circuit” finds herself pleading for her partner’s affections as he is drawn deeper into the nihilistic abyss of incel ideology. “Deep in the soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded,” laments Zauner, “Carrying dull prayers of old men singing holier truths.”

More achingly introspective cuts, such as the devastating portrait of estrangement “Little Girl” and mystical homage to mythological anguish “Leda,” find Zauner especially vulnerable as her own melancholic artist’s disposition seeps through the fabric of “character.” The former—which opens with the stunning line, “Pissing in the corner of a hotel suite / Do you always remember where you are?”—finds its narrator lonesome, marinating in the delirium of noontime gin and “dreaming of a daughter who won’t speak to [him].” On such tracks, Zauner demonstrates her ability to convincingly inhabit damaged and dysfunctional headspaces, her observations as eloquent as they are chilling. The outstanding “Leda,” on the other hand, finds Zauner ruminating upon the unbearable toll taken by mythology on love and longing—so often essentially a history of aimless men and the knowing gods who take advantage of their foolish desires and mortal weaknesses. It is here that Zauner offers some of her finest verse: “Gordian-like knot / Raveled by the days / Tried to cut you off / Somehow pulled it tighter.” The oppressive sorrow permeating this track is perhaps the album’s heaviest, with Zauner breathing ghostlike, “You wait and wait and wait…”

The deceptively twangy indie pop of “Picture Window” only momentarily veils an underlying memento mori—a prominent motif throughout the album—as Zauner inquires, “Are you not afraid of every waking minute / That your life could pass you by?” An album haunted by the inevitability of death, For Melancholy Brunettes reminds the listener to harken to the Void’s nightly tune, to recall the ephemeral nature of being in such proclamations as, “All of my ghosts are real / All of my ghosts are my home.” “Men in Bars,” a striking country pop-tinged duet with none other than Oscar-winning actor and musician Jeff Bridges, and the swaying “Winter in LA” shift the mood slightly with their nostalgic throwbacks to the smoothly saccharine sounds of the ’70s Laurel Canyon scene. Both tracks demonstrate Zauner’s artistic reach and wide range of influences, further diversifying the album’s soundscapes.

For Melancholy Brunettes’ finest moment, however, is its most stark and unassuming track: the stirring closer “Magic Mountain.” Essentially a culmination of all influences drawn by Zauner from Mann’s novel, the track, despite the heft of its namesake, is brief, haunting, and simple—muted in comparison to many of the album’s entries—as well as painfully gorgeous, and perhaps among the most extraordinary songs yet written by Zauner. Though nearly spiritual in its delicacy, “Magic Mountain” carries a great artistic weight, marking a golden ending to a somnolent, often exasperating creative and emotional trek—with Death’s specter lingering, of course, right around the corner. Bearing her brilliant poetic soul, Zauner concludes:

Playing king, playing bride
Blooming in my leisure
Slipping hours left uncounted
You and me, and soon ours
Bury me beside you
In the shadow of my mountain.

For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) marks a drastic departure from Jubilee’s expressively energetic tone, its devotion to the exploration of artists and their often-tragic vulnerabilities enshrouding the album in a thick mystique of nebulous indigo. This in mind, certain fans of its predecessor’s exuberantly maximalist textures may initially find themselves taken aback, or perhaps even underwhelmed, by For Melancholy Brunettes’ quiet forebodings—but then, this would be just as well. It is a special album whose appeal has been tailored to a specific cohort…poets and their drowned loves, artists and their lethal whimsies, and ultimately devotees of those challenging and defiant fourth albums, eager to see a successful artist break so swiftly with the popular culture and its sometimes-stifling expectations. Doubtless, this is Japanese Breakfast’s “artist’s” album—daring, literary, entirely inspired, and unique. This time around, Zauner sings for the artists, poets, and every swollen heart dying of love. (www.japanesebreakfast.com)

Author rating: 9/10