Japanese Breakfast Have Announced A New Album For 2025

For Melancholy Brunettes follows a transformative period in Zauner’s life during which her GRAMMY nominated breakthrough album Jubilee and her bestselling memoir Crying In H Mart catapulted her into the cultural mainstream, delivering on her deepest ...

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After adecade making the most of improvised recording spaces set inwarehouses, trailers and lofts, ’s fourth album, due on , marks theband’s first proper studio release. Produced by — aninnovator of uncommon subtlety, known for his work witheveryone from Bob Dylan to Fiona Apple and quietly regardedas many a legacy artist’s favorite guitar player — andtracked at the venerable Sound City in Los Angeles —birthplace of , and among other classics — therecord sees front-woman and songwriter pull back from the bright extroversion thatdefined its predecessor to examine the darkerwaves that roil within, the moody, fecund field ofmelancholy, long held to be the psychic state of poets onthe verge of inspiration. The result is an artisticstatement of purpose: a mature, intricate, contemplativework that conjures the romantic thrill of a gothicnovel.

follows a transformative period inZauner’s life during which her GRAMMY nominatedbreakthrough album and her bestselling memoir catapulted her into the culturalmainstream, delivering on her deepest artistic ambitions.Reflecting on that success, Zauner came to appreciate theirony of desire, which so often commingles bliss and doom.“ ,”she says.



“ ” Though Zauner hasexperimented with science fiction on and buoyant surrealism on ,the landscape of European Romanticism that underpins and thedense tissue of classical allusion that comes with it marksnew territory for a songwriter entering her artisticmaturity. She credits a range of antecedents withinspiration. The forlorn café girl in Degas’“L’absinthe”.

The seascapes of Caspar David Friedrich.The passionate longing and wild, undulating moors in . Hans Castorp wrapped in his camelhair blanket, dreaming on the Berghof balcony.

It is anatmosphere made palpable by the intricate, interlockingguitar arrangements that accompany much of the record,lapping like waves over the meter, often as oblique in theirexpression of the chord as Zauner can be in her polyvalenceof feeling and insight. Sadness is the dominantemotional key of this record, but it is sadness of ararified form: the pensive, prescient sadness of melancholy,in which the recognition of life’s essentially tragiccharacter occurs with sensitivity to its fleeting beauty.Zauner finds space enough inside it for glimmers of hope.

They are the consolations of mortals that poets before herhave called out to and that poets after will continue torediscover: love and labor, and though they run like tonicresolutions through the record’s manyepisodes..