Japanese Breakfast releases a video for ‘Winter In LA,’ a highlight from their acclaimed new album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), out now via Dead Oceans. The video, shot in South Korea, is directed by Michelle Zauner and Peter Ash Lee and produced by SSENSE. “I made this video with Peter Ash Lee, who also shot the cover of Jubilee. I loved the idea of playing a fussy bride who ruins her own wedding,” Zauner explains.
Hot on the heels of an appearance at Coachella, which Rolling Stone called “one of the best sets of the day,” and a rousing performance of ‘Picture Window’ on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Japanese Breakfast expands the tour in support of Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), with newly added shows in Los Angeles at the legendary The Greek Theater and SDSU in San Diego. The tour includes dates across North America, Asia, Europe, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Tickets for the newly announced dates will go live at 10 am EST local time via japanesebreakfast.rocks.
Produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills and tracked at Sound City in Los Angeles, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) sees 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.
“I think of melancholy as a kind of anticipatory grief, one that comes from an acknowledgment of the passage of time, from the recognition of mortality and finitude. In some way, too, I think it marks the artist’s condition, constantly observing through that lens,” Zauner says of the album. “‘Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy,’ Virginia Woolfe writes. I wanted this album to capture the moments where that knife slips. When people want too much, when they cede to temptation, when they are seduced and punished.”
WATCH THE PREVIOUSLY RELEASED VIDEOS
Japanese Breakfast – Orlando in Love (Official Video)
Japanese Breakfast – Picture Window (Official Video)
Though Zauner has experimented with science fiction on Soft Sounds from Another Planet and buoyant surrealism on Jubilee, the landscape of European Romanticism that underpins For Melancholy Brunettes and the dense tissue of classical allusion that comes with it marks new territory for a songwriter entering her artistic maturity. She credits a range of antecedents with inspiration. The forlorn café girl in Degas’ “L’absinthe”. The seascapes of Caspar David Friedrich. The passionate longing and wild, undulating moors in Wuthering Heights. Hans Castorp wrapped in his camel hair blanket, dreaming on the Berghof balcony. It is an atmosphere made palpable by the intricate, interlocking guitar arrangements that accompany much of the record, lapping like waves over the meter, often as oblique in their expression of the chord as Zauner can be in her polyvalence of feeling and insight.
Sadness is the dominant emotional key of this record, but it is sadness of a rarified form: the pensive, prescient sadness of melancholy, in which the recognition of life’s essentially tragic character occurs with sensitivity to its fleeting beauty. Zauner finds space enough inside it for glimmers of hope. They are the consolations of mortals that poets before her have called out to and that poets after will continue to rediscover: love and labor, and though they run like tonic resolutions through the record’s many episodes.
Praise for Japanese Breakfast
“For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) is a folk tale, a small-town barroom yarn, a gothic novel, and a ghost story. Don’t even try to pin her down.” -Rolling Stone
“Japanese Breakfast make an early bid for album of the year.” -AV Club
“A cerebral yet deeply felt album” -Associated Press
“A very assured singer-songwriter record” -NPR
“Expands its sound in broad strokes without missing the fine details that have made Zauner and her band so cherished.” –Pitchfork
“It’s new lore for a new era, but Zauner remains firmly herself” -Vulture
“A highly cinematic collection of stories that consistently delivers” -Wall Street Journal
“How lucky we are to live in the shadow of Japanese Breakfast’s mountain.” -Paste Magazine
“Daring, literary, entirely inspired, and unique.” -Under The Radar
“Love, in its romantic grandeur and quotidian expressions, dominates “For Melancholy Brunettes.” Sometimes, it’s a trickle. Sometimes, it flows like a burst dam” -Washington Post
“Zauner zeroes in on the things that inspire her most: love, desire, and a good story. It almost feels like a tiny miracle, a Cinderella story of DIY punk who got everything she wanted and, somehow, didn’t lose sight of herself.” -Stereogum
Japanese Breakfast
For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)
TRACK LIST:
- Here is Someone
- Orlando in Love
- Honey Water
- Mega Circuit
- Little Girl
- Leda
- Picture Window
- Men in Bars (Feat. Jeff Bridges)
- Winter in LA
- Magic Mountain
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