Album Review: Japanese Breakfast’s For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)
By Ansharah Shakil, April 30 2025—
The stories that inspired For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) are numerous, from the title — taken from John Cheever’s short story “The Chimera”, which is also used in lead single “Orlando in Love” — to the tracks that reference Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Italian Renaissance poem “Orlando Innamorato”, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and myths like that of Leda, Icarus and Venus. It’s an extensive mythos that marks an intriguing change in indie-pop band Japanese Breakfast’s discography.
It’s been four years since the last Japanese Breakfast album. Vocalist, guitarist and primary songwriter Michelle Zauner first started the project in 2013, but her music career began far before that. On Little Big League’s These Are Good People, an album released by the band Zauner fronted before starting Japanese Breakfast, you can hear all the staggering hints of the stardom that was to arrive. And arrive it did. Japanese Breakfast’s first two albums, Psychopomp and Soft Sounds from Another Planet, received critical acclaim. The subsequent 2021 album Jubilee, more pop-tinged than its predecessors, earned two Grammy nominations.
In her best-selling and critically acclaimed memoir Crying in H-Mart, Zauner writes on her grief over her mother’s death in 2014. With its moving prose, delicate descriptions of food and exploration of Zauner’s biracial Korean-American identity alongside her relationship with her mother, reading Crying in H-Mart changes the way you view Zauner’s music. The smaller details become more clear, the full meaning further illuminated like turning on a light switch in a dark room.
The latest album’s “Orlando in Love” is the perfect example, with its myriad of references to Orlando, “Orlando Innamorato”, “The Chimera” and Venus. The outro is a breathtaking melody. It’s appropriate that the song references the sea — its orchestral, flowery qualities are reminiscent of the tides.
In some ways, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) lacks the propulsion found in Japanese Breakfast’s previous work. It doesn’t immediately catch your ear, and it does feel more one-note, however lovely the production and vocals are. It’s a definite step away from the bright, inherent joy of Jubilee, but isn’t quite like the indie pop and rock of Psychopomp or the dreaminess of Soft Sounds from Another Planet, either. That seems intentional, since this album shifts to cover more ground, examining the highs and lows of the increase in fame Zauner received after Crying in H-Mart and Jubilee.
On For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), Zauner’s lyrics are astonishing as always, with sparse and stirring songwriting all the way through on every track. Her imagery is startlingly real, painting a picture with just a few words. Album-opener “Here is Someone” sets the tone for the crisp and gentle production of the album, with elegant strings, tender vocals and simple and stunning lyrics like, “Measure by measure / In time with the songs we loved.”
This sound makes a slow pivot to the stomping, swinging “Honey Water”, one of the best tracks off the album. The outro, where Zauner sings “So it goes” — perhaps another reference, this time to Slaughterhouse Five — and “I don’t mind” over and over, is a masterpiece where the guitar and drums build and build into a cathartic conclusion.
“Mega Circuit” follows in the vein of “Honey Water”, bringing in the country influences that will remain for the rest of the album with a certain bite to its swaying piano and examining toxic masculinity in the modern age. Both “Honey Water” and “Mega Circuit” are in contrast to gentle ballads “Little Girl” and “Leda.” The latter two are both stronger than the Jeff Bridges duet “Men in Bars”, which picks up the thread of affairs that was begun in “Honey Water.” One of the biggest standouts on the album is “Picture Window”, an exploration of anxiety over the passing of time, where Zauner sings, “Are you not afraid that your life could pass you by?” A minute and 25 seconds in, post singing the hook, “But all of my ghosts are real”, there’s one pause before the drums kick in, the word “heartbreaking” delivered with a country stride.
The album closes with the twinkling production of “Winter in LA”, its contrasting images and plaintive, bittersweet longing the perfect call-back to the album’s title, and with final track the fairytale-like nature of “Magic Mountain.” Both songs gather the qualities of the preceding ones, bringing everything together. Like the rest of the album, they’re carefully intimate, grounding the themes of the other tracks. It shows off the greatest strength of For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women): its cohesive story-telling and melodic qualities.