Japanese Breakfast’s new album weaves myth with meditation

For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)

Japanese Breakfast (Dead Oceans, 2025)

Japanese Breakfast rocketed into our music world in 2013. Founder/vocalist/guitarist Michelle Zauner formed the group as a side project, naming it after a GIF animation. A year later, she moved home to care for her dying mother, and the indie pop Japanese Breakfast became an outlet for her grief and her attempts to reconcile different parts of her own identity. While Zauner’s lyrics wrestle with deep feelings, the tempo of the music has largely stayed, well, hopeful. The overall tone is more wistful on the band’s fourth release, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), but it’s still hopeful. It’s also a beautiful, ballady follow-up to 2021’s acclaimed Jubilee.

Although Zauner is backed by her tight supporting crew (and moments of orchestral brilliance), she’s clearly the driver here, her lilting soprano vocals soft and almost childlike, yet insistent and resonant. She weaves together quirky fictional tales with her own yearnings and sorrows. The lead single, “Orlando in Love,” steps into mythic waters, where Roman goddess Venus steps out of an oyster to entice a poet, “Singing his name with all the sweetness / Of a mother / Leaving him breathless and then / Drowned.” On “Leda,” Zauner seems to conjure ancient Greece—Leda being the Spartan queen seduced by the god Zeus disguised as a swan—while revisiting a moment of bonding with her own father, with whom she has a complicated relationship.

She follows up that track with the bouncy, twangy “Picture Window”—the song’s catchiness belying the tense nature of the lyrics: “All of my ghosts are real / All of my ghosts are home,” she sings in the chorus.

Most of the 10 songs on For Melancholy Brunettes aren’t any longer than three minutes, bringing the album to just 32 minutes total—nowhere near enough from a band that’s simply getting better with age.