Limited Time JAPANESE BREAKFAST FOR MELANCHOLY BRUNETTES (& SAD WOMEN) (BLACK VINYL) – LP

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UPC: 656605172514 Label: DEAD OCEANS Format: LPRelease Date: March 21, 2025In stock items ship within 48 hours

After a decade making the most of improvised recording spacesset in warehouses, trailers and lofts, Japanese Breakfast’s fourthalbum, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), marks the band’sfirst proper studio release. Produced by Grammy Award winnerBlake Mills, the record sees front-woman and songwriter MichelleZauner pull back from the bright extroversion that defined itspredecessor Jubilee to examine the darker waves that roil within,the moody, fecund field of melancholy, long held to be the psychicstate of poets on the verge of inspiration. The result is an artisticstatement of purpose: a mature, intricate, contemplative work thatconjures the romantic thrill of a gothic novel.

For Melancholy Brunettes follows a transformative period inZauner’s life during which her 2x GRAMMY nominated breakthroughalbum Jubilee and her bestselling memoir Crying In H Martcatapulted her into the cultural mainstream, delivering on herdeepest artistic ambitions. Reflecting on that success, Zauner cameto appreciate the irony of desire, which so often commingles blissand doom. “I felt seduced by getting what I always wanted,” shesays. “I was flying too close to the sun, and I realized if I keptgoing I was going to die.”

The plight of Icarus and other such condemned ones lends ForMelancholy Brunettes its most persistent theme, the perils ofdesire. Like light dispersed, its spectral parts take the album’scharacters through cycles of temptation, transgression andretribution. On “Orlando in Love” — a riff on John Cheever’s riff onOrlando Innamorato, an unfinished epic made up of 68 ½ cantos bythe Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo — the hero is a wellmeaning poet who parks his Winnebago by the sea and falls victimto a siren’s call, his 69th canto (even in the lofty realm of classicalmyth Zauner has a soft spot for innuendo). “Honey Water” plumbsthe quiet rage of a woman married to an unfaithful man, watchinghim cede again and again to lust like a base insect perpetuating itsown demise.

Sadness is indeed the dominant emotional key of this record, but itis sadness of a rarified form: the pensive, prescient sadness ofmelancholy, in which the recognition of life’s essentially tragiccharacter occurs with sensitivity to its fleeting beauty. Zauner findsspace enough inside it for glimmers of hope. They are theconsolations of mortals that poets before her have called out toand that poets after will continue to rediscover: love and labor, andthough they run like tonic resolutions through the record’s manyepisodes, they sound most saliently on its final song, “MagicMountain,” an engagement with Thomas Mann’s famous novel ofthe same name. For her, making any work feels like scaling amountain, but from the perch of For Melancholy Brunettes, shesurveys the future.

TRACK LIST:

SIDE A:1. Here is Someone2. Orlando in Love3. Honey Water4. Mega Circuit5. Little Girl

SIDE B:6. Leda7. Picture Window8. Men in Bars9. Winter in LA10. Magic Mountain