It has been an awesome few months for indie rock. Everyone—from flipturn to Sam Fender—has been dropping albums, but the release I had marked on my Google Calendar for months was Japanese Breakfast’s fourth studio album: “For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women).” It would have been pretty disastrous for me—and by extension, my loved ones—if this album had been bad. Good news: It was fantastic. From the production to the vocals to the lyrics, “For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)” is 32 minutes and 22 seconds of musical excellence.
If there is one thing Japanese Breakfast never misses on, it is an album cover. The cover of “For Melancholy Brunettes” features lead singer and primary songwriter Michelle Zauner with her head in her arms, surrounded by a decadent feast and the album name scrawled in white cursive above her. It looks like a modern Renaissance painting: tragic, compelling and beautiful all at once. Visually, it is much more similar to their second album cover, “Soft Sounds from Another Planet,” than the bright yellows of their third album, “Jubilee.” In terms of thematic callbacks to their earlier work, this parallel is no accident.
Production-wise, “For Melancholy Brunettes” may be Japanese Breakfast’s best work yet. In the past, the band has proven their ability to balance the acoustic and electronic with finesse, and this album is no exception. Their command of dynamics is striking, bringing melodies to sweeping crescendos and gently pulling them back into moments of near-silence seamlessly. Historically, Japanese Breakfast has been a firmly indie rock band with roots in the DIY scene. This remains true, but this record stands out as particularly unconstrained by the label “indie rock.” From guitar lines and swinging drum beats that are almost derivative of country to sparkling synthesizer rhythms, “For Melancholy Brunettes” is expansive.
What I loved most about this album were the flourishes strewn throughout. These songs are sonically overflowing, adorned by bells chiming, hissing whispers and far-off synth riffs that are almost orchestral in quality. They also get orchestral in the literal sense: Look to the rising strings section in “Orlando in Love” for a deeply compelling example, or the dark piano of “Honey Water.” Japanese Breakfast has a finely tuned ability to know the difference between full and crowded in a song, delivering catchy and experimental tracks like “Mega Circuit” and “Picture Window” to arrestingly beautiful ballads like “Leda” and “Here is Someone.” Do not get me wrong, the album has weaker points (sorry, “Men in Bars”), but this is a work that is made better by interactions between its component parts. The songs are great on their own, but made that much more interesting and rewarding by experiencing them as an album.
Thematically, we are far from the bright exuberance of their previous album, “Jubilee.” “For Melancholy Brunettes” returns back to the more heartbreaking themes of previous Japanese Breakfast albums, but in a very different way. Zauner is the band’s primary songwriter, and much of her earlier music deals with her mother’s premature death from breast cancer, alongside broader themes of transformation, sexuality and memory. Here, Zauner takes a poet’s eye to the ever-human feelings of inadequacy and longing for more. From “Honey Water,” where she mourns the transgressions of an unfaithful partner, to the slow-dance of “Winter in LA,” where she laments not being able to soften herself, this is an album rich with shortcomings.
Zauner also gets literary on this album. “Leda” is named for Helen of Troy’s egg-laying mother in Greek mythology, while “Orlando in Love” and “Magic Mountain” take their names from books by Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann respectively. If the literary references feel surprising from an indie rock band, remember that frontwoman Michelle Zauner is not only a musician, but also the bestselling author of the memoir “Crying in H-Mart.” There, Zauner tells the story of her mother’s death, intertwined with her own struggle with her Korean identity and culture. One summer, I read it at my bookstore job—it deserves every bit of hype that it gets, but I did feel bad about all the weeping I did in front of the customers.
Previously, Zauner’s lyrics have been imbued with an overwhelming grief toward her mother. On this album, she brings her father into the conversation. “Little Girl” and “Leda” are the most prominent examples. Written from the perspective of an estranged alcoholic father and the daughter he left behind, respectively, these companion tracks are an exploration of mutual grief and the difficulties of someone never quite being who you need them to be. Zauner discusses her father in “Crying in H-Mart:” She describes him as being avoidant in the wake of her mother’s death, a white man struggling to connect to his daughter and her very real need to keep her mother alive through her Korean heritage. This theme of the father-daughter dynamic kept coming back for me as I listened to this album. “Men in Bars,” featuring Jeff Bridges is, on the surface, a song about a failed romance, but it could just as easily be a duet between a father and daughter who are at opposite ends of an insurmountable emotional distance. I like this interpretation better, as I am not sure I buy Jeff Bridges’ voice as the voice of Michelle Zauner’s lover.
For me, the thesis of this album is desire, a hope that things will be different accompanied by the knowledge that this hope may be an impossibility. Shortcoming and wanting are deeply intertwined: The pain of distance from a parent comes from the fact that you are always hoping for them to be what you need to be one day, and the pain of coming up short with your lover comes from the fact that you find yourself hoping that one day you might be enough. On “For Melancholy Brunettes,” Zauner hopes for so much, but it is not hope in the bright and shiny way we usually conceptualize it to be. It is marred by fear and anxiety and trauma—but in the end it is still hope, tentative hope.