Review: sad women rejoice! Japanese Breakfast is back, and her pen is lethal

By Basma Bedawi     4/8/25 11:20pm

Rating: ★★★★

Best track: ‘Mega Circuit’ 

Michelle Zauner returns as Japanese Breakfast for the first time in two years with her new album “For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women).” The album comes 10 years after Zauner’s mother died, and Zauner said in a DIY Magazine interview that her grief speaks to the album’s theme of melancholy. This melancholy is potent throughout this album: Zauner has an incredible knack for turning her life experiences into pieces of masterful fiction set to music. She sprinkles blink-and-you’ll-miss-it metaphors and references throughout the album.  

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“For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)” opens with guitar-led “Here is Someone.” Most of the album is guitar-led, as Zauner felt that her previous record, “Jubilee,” did not allow enough space for her to play this instrument, meaning she had to entirely front as a singer, a dynamic that made her uncomfortable. 

Over a soft, lullaby-like instrumental, Zauner simply tells us she is “Quietly dreaming of slower days/But I don’t want to let you down/We’ve come so far.” Much of the album wrestles with Zauner’s experiences with success; she spent almost a year in South Korea recuperating after her rapid rise to notoriety. 

Her next track, “Orlando in Love,” feels like it belongs in a movie. It has a similar soft instrumental to the previous song and is the first foray (of many) the album takes into mythology. With “Honey Water,” the album picks up with strong drums and a less acoustic backing guitar. Zauner is incredibly poetic in this song, singing that “the lure of honey water draws you from my arms so needy…insatiable for a nectar/Drinking ‘til your heart expires.”

“Mega Circuit” rides on this momentum, with more strong backing instrumentals and kicking drums in a shuffle groove (as she says in the song, “I’m gonna write my baby a shuffle good”). This song dives into incel culture and the way quiet rage is passed down from older men to younger boys – the “incel eunuchs” are “kicking mud off ATVs.” In the next track, “Little Girl,” the central character — a father who regrets the decisions that have led to estrangement from his daughter — is watching these ATVs drive as he reflects. This song returns to the simpler, quiet sound of the first songs on the album, leaning heavily into melancholy. 

The following track, “Leda,” has a remarkably similar backing track to the previous, a choice that makes sense once you realize this song is from the perspective of the estranged daughter referenced in “Little Girl.” This track is saturated with references to Greek mythology; she sings that she’s “thinking of all the Grecian gods,” which is evident.  

Modern day albums feel more like a collection of songs than anything, with no mind paid to the order of the work. However, with all of her writerly knowledge, Japanese Breakfast has deliberately placed her album in a particular order to have a through line. It makes for a listening experience that takes you through an emotional journey. 

Zauner is honestly kind of offended that you are not living in constant fear that she will die in “Picture Window.” She struggles to escape this fear since “all of [her] ghosts are real,” meaning they will die one day. It’s an inevitability she can’t take her mind off of.  She asks the listener, “do you not conceive of my death at every minute/while your life just passes you by?” 

The album takes a dip for the rest of its runtime as “Men in Bars,” featuring Jeff Bridges, begins.  Like “Orlando in Love,” this song sounds like it belongs in a movie. However, this one feels more like a fictional song written for and performed in a Marvel movie. Jeff Bridges is messing up the vibe. Get him out of here. 

In “Winter in LA,” Zauner wishes she were a happier woman. This song is uncharacteristically simple for Japanese Breakfast: she says exactly what she means, with no layers of metaphor or hidden meaning. But it has a tambourine in the background, which is fun.

With the last track on the album, “Magic Mountain,” Japanese Breakfast doesn’t quite stick the landing. Rather than finishing the work with her perspective, she writes from the point of view of Hans Castrop, a fictional character from a book of the same name. It sounds markedly similar to most other tracks on the work: when the album plays on loop, it’s hard to tell where “Magic Mountain” ends and “Here is Someone” begins. 

While some of the songs on “For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)” could be more sonically distinctive, it is clear that Japanese Breakfast is incredibly masterful in her craft.  This album is for close listeners and lyric lovers, best enjoyed with Genius pulled up and noise-cancelling headphones on. 

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