“L’Absinthe” by Edgar Degas. “Tired” by Ramón Casas. “The Wedding Dress” by Frederick Elwell. These are the portrayals of women experiencing extreme despair that inspired Michelle Zauner in the production of Japanese Breakfast’s new album, “For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women),” which was released on March 21.
Unlike the earlier lo-fi recordings with friends, this album marks Japanese Breakfast’s first true studio project — a lush blend of baroque pop, chamber textures and soft electronics that capture quiet heartbreak and steady resilience.
For this album, Zauner collaborated with producer Blake Mills — known for work with Alabama Shakes, Fiona Apple and Perfume Genius — at legendary recording studio Sound City in Los Angeles.
This is the fourth album by the group, which was formed in 2013 when Zauner, feeling creatively stuck, launched a blog to post a song a day for a month. Those recordings became the band’s first songs, leading to their debut album “Psychopomp” in 2016. Since then, Japanese Breakfast has carved out a distinct space in the indie music landscape — balancing vulnerability with grandeur, dreamy textures with grounded storytelling.
Zauner began writing the album in the winter of 2022. According to a profile in Time Magazine, she had a clear objective to create something more introspective than her previous works. She wanted the songs to be more guitar-driven than her 2021 album “Jubilee,” which featured lush horns and slinky synths.
In her most recent album, she opens with a gentle force: “Here Is Someone” reflects the longing to settle down with a partner juxtaposed with the fear of letting them down. The lyrics are sparse, spanning just four verses, but the track surrounds the listener in tuned percussion and delicate woodwinds. It closes with a line that feels like a melancholic hug: “Life is sad but here is someone.” The second track and lead single, “Orlando in Love,” references the Italian Renaissance epic poem “Orlando Innamorato.” It blends vivid seascape descriptions with the tale of “a whimsical, foolish male protagonist who lives by the sea in a Winnebago RV and is seduced by a siren” — according to Zauner’s interview with Rolling Stone. The song is restrained and lets Zauner’s melodies breathe over stripped-down instrumentation.
Some tracks channel a sense of raw frustration. In “Honey Water,” Zauner confronts a partner’s infidelity with painful clarity. “Why can’t you be faithful?” she desperately implores. “Mega Circuit” mocks toxic masculinity with lines like “Barreling ‘round the mega circuit / Kicking mud off ATVs.” Meanwhile, “Winter in LA” captures the quiet frustration of not being the kind of “happier woman” her lover seems to want.
One standout feature of the album is its rich literary tapestry. Zauner immersed herself in literature while creating the album. She sought to trace how melancholy — especially in the context of family, longing, love and society — has been portrayed throughout time. Her journey began with European Romanticism and ancient Greek mythology, eventually spiraling into the dark intensity of Gothic novels like “Jane Eyre,” “Wuthering Heights” and “Frankenstein.” She even ventured into the modernist genre with “The Magic Mountain,” — a personal favorite of her husband and bandmate Peter Bradley — that heavily shaped the track’s lyrical narrative.
The storytelling doesn’t end with the songs. The album’s cover art depicts Zauner collapsed face-down on a banquet table, surrounded by an overflowing feast — like a gothic heroine frozen mid-breakdown.
“I like the idea of being someone just collapsed on a table, surrounded by a wealth of goods,” Zauner explained in an interview with Time Magazine. “Like a spoiled prince or something.” The image walks the line between excess and emptiness, emotional performance and vulnerability.
Zauner admitted she was surprised by the reaction when the album’s title was announced. On social media, some assumed she was putting together a series of sad breakup songs, while others saw it as her reclaiming a label that had often been used to diminish or mock artists who wrote these songs of melancholia.
“I think [the album title] was a little bit tongue-in-cheek,” she told Time Magazine. “And it was maybe taken very literally.”
The label “sad girl” is often used to flatten the work of women who explore emotional depth in their songwriting — a lazy shorthand that turns complex, layered artistry into a meme. Zauner criticizes this tendency. She explained that a lot of brilliant women are deemed ‘sad girls’ for daring to be honest, as if sorrow should be ornamental but not intellectual.
“For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)” is a chamber of mirrors, a soft exorcism of desire and disappointment. With literary depth and sonic elegance, Zauner invites us into a space where sorrow is not a weakness, but a lens that distorts and sharpens at once. This album doesn’t ask for pity, nor does it wallow — it lingers. It sits in the silence after a difficult conversation, in the quiet unraveling of a memory, in the way a single sentence can echo for years.
This album feels like it belongs on a shelf beside Sappho’s “Fragments” or the letters never sent in Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” It doesn’t imitate these works, but it shares a certain courage: the courage to treat feeling as something worth archiving. To be melancholic here is not to surrender but to pay attention. In that attention — precise, deliberate, unafraid — Zauner creates not just music, but meaning.
