Name: For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women)
Brand: Japanese Breakfast

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

DOC425LPC1

Colour

Brown

Colour details

Frosted Shadow&nbsp;

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: Yes

Format detail

Format Music US

Limited edition

Release date

2025-03-21

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier US

Secre­tly

Tax rate US

Sales:8.875

UPC / Barcode

0656605172538

Total Cap

9999

Brown LP

DOC425LP

Black

Extended format: No

0656605172514

Black LP

DOC425CD

0656605172521

DOC425CASS

Tape

0674012929729

Artist

Japanese Breakfast

Genre US

Indie Pop / Shoegaze

Label US

Dead Oceans

A solo moniker for Philadelphia musician Michelle Zauner, Japanese Breakfast began as a monthlong, song-a-day writing challenge during a break from her indie rock band Little Big League. That resulted in 2013's June, an intimate set of melodic, electric guitar-accompanied lo-fi tunes issued on cassette by Ranch Records.
She continued to write solo and with her band, with Japanese Breakfast's self-released Where Is My Great Big Feeling? and the Seagreen Records cassette American Sound both following in the summer of 2014 before Little Big League's Tropical Jinx arrived that October.
With a varied palette including markedly bigger, synth-boosted sounds that bridged lo-fi and indie pop, Japanese Breakfast's Yellow K Records debut, Psychopomp, was released in the spring of 2016.

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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 Zauner’s 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 bliss and doom. “I felt seduced by getting what I always wanted,” she says. “I was flying too close to the sun, and I realized if I kept going I was going to die.” The plight of Icarus and other such condemned ones lends For Melancholy Brunettes its most persistent theme, the perils of desire. Like light dispersed, its spectral parts take the album’s characters through cycles of temptation, transgression and retribution. On “Orlando in Love” — a riff on John Cheever’s riff on Orlando Innamorato, an unfinished epic made up of 68 ½ cantos by the Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo — the hero is a well meaning poet who parks his Winnebago by the sea and falls victim to a siren’s call, his 69th canto (even in the lofty realm of classical myth Zauner has a soft spot for innuendo). “Honey Water” plumbs the quiet rage of a woman married to an unfaithful man, watching him cede again and again to lust like a base insect perpetuating its own demise.

Sadness is indeed 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, they sound most saliently on its final song, “Magic Mountain,” an engagement with Thomas Mann’s famous novel of the same name. For her, making any work feels like scaling a mountain, but from the perch of For Melancholy Brunettes, she surveys the future.

For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women)

Music US

Discover For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women) by Japanese Breakfast on Dead Oceans. Produced by Grammy winner Blake Mills, this vinyl record delves into melancholy with mature introspection.