Japanese Breakfast announce new album For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)

Japanese Breakfast has announced the release of their fourth album For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), due March 21.

The group will also embark on a UK, EU and US tour, which will include a number of festivals and kick off with California’s Coachella Music and Arts Festival in mid-April. No stops have been announced in Ireland yet.

It is accompanied by the release of the lead single ‘Orlando in Love’, described as 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.

Listen to ‘Orlando in Love’ below:

The follow up to Japanese Breakfast’s 2021 Grammy-nominated record Jubilee, For Melancholy Brunettes examines 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.

It was produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills, known for his work with everyone from Bob Dylan to Fiona Apple - and tracked at the venerable Sound City in Los Angeles - birthplace of After The Gold Rush, Fleetwood Mac and Nevermind, among other classics.

For Melancholy Brunettes follows a transformative period in frontwoman Michelle Zauner’s life during last album Jubilee and her bestselling memoir Crying In H Mart catapulted her into the cultural mainstream.

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."

You can pre-order For Melancholy Brunettes here.

Find the full track list below:

1. Here is Someone
2. Orlando in Love
3. Honey Water
4. Mega Circuit
5. Little Girl
6. Leda
7. Picture Window
8. Men in Bars (feat. Jeff Bridges)
9. Winter in LA
10. Magic Mountain