Japanese Breakfast, the musical project of multi-hyphenate Michelle Zauner, releases a self-directed video for their new single ‘Savage Good Boy,’ starring Michael Imperioli of The Sopranos. The track was unveiled via Beats 1’s Zane Lowe as a New Music Daily and its video was profiled by Vogue, who have described Zauner’s extravagant outfits as “fabulously attired” and “eye popping.”
“‘Savage Good Boy’ came from a headline I read about billionaires buying bunkers. I was interested in examining that specific type of villainy, and I found myself adopting the perspective of a rich man coaxing a young woman to come live with him underground, attempting to rationalize his almost impossible share of greed and miserliness,” says Zauner.
“I knew I wanted the music video to be a pretty literal interpretation of that idea. I wanted to juxtapose images of this post-apocalyptic, industrial bunker with the lightness and extravagance of rococo fashion and set design. Aiming for that balance, my cinematographer, Adam Kolodny, and I were really inspired by Chan Wook Park’s The Handmaiden, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Sally Potter’s Orlando.”
Jubilee, Japanese Breakfast’s anticipated new album is available for pre-order now and due June 4th via Dead Oceans.
Additionally, Zauner’s critically acclaimed New York Times Best Selling memoir Crying In H Mart is due for release in the UK in hardback from Picador on 5 August 2021. Based on her viral 2018 New Yorker essay, Crying In H Mart is her unflinching and powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.
From the moment she began writing her new album, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner knew that she wanted to call it Jubilee. After all, a jubilee is a celebration of the passage of time—a festival to usher in the hope of a new era in brilliant technicolor. Zauner’s first two albums garnered acclaim for the way they grappled with anguish; Psychopomp was written as her mother underwent cancer treatment, while Soft Sounds From Another Planet took the grief she held from her mother‘s death and used it as a conduit to explore the cosmos. Now, at the start of a new decade, Japanese Breakfast is ready to fight for happiness, an all-too-scarce resource in our seemingly crumbling world.
How does she do it? With a joyful noise. Jubilee bursts with the most wide-ranging arrangements of Zauner’s career. Each song unfurls a new aspect of her artistry.
In the years leading up to Jubilee, Zauner also took theory lessons and studied piano in earnest for the first time, in an effort to improve her range as a songwriter: “I’ve never wanted to rest on any laurels. I wanted to push it as far as it could go, inviting more people in and pushing myself as a composer, a producer, and arranger.”
Throughout Jubilee, Zauner is hardly fictionalizing her lyrics, instead pouring her own life into the universe of each song to tell real stories, and allowing those universes, in turn, to fill in the details. Joy, change, evolution—these things take real-time, and real effort. And Japanese Breakfast is here for it.
EARLY PRAISE FOR JUBILEE:
“We may be contending with grief and illness on a mass scale, but Japanese Breakfast gives us a way to resist sorrow.” – Pitchfork, Best New Track
“Confidently opens up her sonic universe. ‘Be Sweet’ is immaculately executed ‘80s synth-pop, down to the polyrhythms and the harmonies that kick in during the radio-ready chorus.” – Billboard
“Cuts through her ubiquitous dreaminess with an effectively direct message. Sincerity is an uphill battle, and Michelle Zauner is committed to the climb.” – The FADER
“fully embracing 1980s powerpop riffs and moody synths” – The Guardian
“‘Be Sweet’ has zig-zag licks of guitar and synth, choppy, slick percussion and vocals that lilt with as much sugar as the song’s title suggests.” – gal-dem
“Zauner teaches us how to resist despair and find joy amidst tragedy – a lesson needed now more than ever” – Loud and Quiet, 9/10
“an album that glistens and sparkles at every moment… the culmination of a journey and the arrival on the biggest stage of a significant talent” – Dork, 5*
“Disco meets dreampop” – The Face
JAPANESE BREAKFAST
JUBILEE
DEAD OCEANS
JUNE 4TH, 2021
- Paprika
- Be Sweet
- Kokomo, IN
- Slide Tackle
- Posing in Bondage
- Sit
- Savage Good Boy
- In Hell
- Tactics
- Posing for Cars
