After a decade making the most of improvised recording spaces set in warehouses, trailers and lofts, Japanese Breakfasts fourth album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), marks the bands first proper studio release. Produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills, the record sees front-woman and songwriter Michelle Zauner pull back from the bright extroversion that defined its predecessor Jubilee to examine the darker waves that roil within, the moody, fecund field of melancholy, long held to be the psychic state of poets on the verge of inspiration. The result is an artistic statement of purpose: a mature, intricate, contemplative work that conjures the romantic thrill of a gothic novel. For Melancholy Brunettes follows a transformative period in Zauners life during which her 2x GRAMMY nominated breakthrough album Jubilee and her bestselling memoir Crying In H Mart catapulted her into the cultural mainstream, delivering on her deepest artistic ambitions. Reflecting on that success, Zauner came
to 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 albumscharacters through cycles of temptation, transgression andretribution. On Orlando in Love a riff on John Cheevers riff onOrlando Innamorato, an unfinished epic made up of 68 cantos bythe Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo the hero is a wellmeaning poet who parks his Winnebago by the sea and falls victimto a sirens 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 lifes 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 records manyepisodes, they sound most saliently on its final song, MagicMountain, an engagement with Thomas Manns 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 Someone
2. Orlando in Love
3. Honey Water
4. Mega Circuit
5. Little Girl
SIDE B
6. Leda
7. Picture Window
8. Men in Bars
9. Winter in LA
10. Magic Mountain