Photo by Pak Bae

“I was flying too close to the sun, and I realized if I kept going I was going to die,” Michelle Zauner has said of what inspired her creative process leading into Japanese Breakfast’s fourth full-length effort, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women). Taking a note out of the plight of Icarus makes sense in the context of her own recent history. The band’s 2021 album, Jubilee, was an acclaimed mainstream breakthrough that — alongside the adoration behind Zauner’s best selling memoir, Crying in H Mart — transcended her from an indie rock cool person to a household name that my own mother literally knows. But “Orlando in Love” doesn’t necessarily fall away from the ornate craft which Japanese Breakfast’s most breathtaking moments can easily consume you. Impressioned by orchestration, poetic Renaissance era fables, and the studio hands of one Blake Mills, it’s impossible not see Zauner in any other light but a glowing one here, even if an exercise in humility is what she aimed for. “As if the sea had bore her to be an ideal woman / She came to him from the water like Venus from a shell / Singing his name with all the sweetness of a mother / Leaving him breathless and then drowned,” she sings. Her siren’s call with do that to you.

Directed by: Michelle Zauner

Japanese Breakfast’s For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) will be released March 21st on Dead Oceans.