japanese breakfast

We get the impression that Michelle Zauner has no interest in repeating herself (even if we’ll gladly listen to this album over & over again).

Every song has its own personality, phasing between bright & bold elements of dream-pop, jangle-pop & synth-pop & offering a vibrantly optimistic resolution to the grief-ridden themes of this record’s predecessors. She’s always had a magical knack for dynamically building songs around adhesive choruses but this is by far her most elaborate showcase for musical ingenuity & ambition. In the triumphant brassy colours of opener ‘Paprika’, or the tender strings of ‘Kokomo, IN’, Zauner’s expanded her palette, yet honed her songwriting impact. It’s her finest album to date & a thumping good’un at that!

Mercurial, yet never jarring, Michelle Zauner’s third lp feels informed by the last 60 years of pop & rock music, compellingly blending dream-pop with hints of 60s surf-rock, 80s pop music or 90s guitar jangles, resulting in her brightest & boldest record to date. From the moment she began writing her new album, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner knew that she wanted to call it Jubilee. After all, a jubilee is a celebration of the passage of time—a festival to usher in the hope of a new era in brilliant technicolor. Zauner’s first two albums garnered acclaim for the way they grappled with anguish; Psychopomp was written as her mother underwent cancer treatment, while Soft Sounds From Another Planet took the grief she held from her mother‘s death and used it as a conduit to explore the cosmos. Now, at the start of a new decade, Japanese Breakfast is ready to fight for happiness, an all-too-scarce resource in our seemingly crumbling world. Jubilee finds Michelle Zauner embracing ambition and, with it, her boldest ideas and songs yet. Inspired by records like Bjork’s Homogenic, Zauner delivers bigness throughout -- big ideas, big textures, colors, sounds and feelings. At a time when virtually everything feels extreme, Jubilee sets its sights on maximal joy, imagination, and exhilaration. It is, in Michelle Zauner’s words, “a record about fighting to feel. I wanted to re-experience the pure, unadulterated joy of creation…The songs are about recalling the optimism of youth and applying it to adulthood. They’re about making difficult choices, fighting ignominious impulses and honoring commitments, confronting the constant struggle we have with ourselves to be better people.” Throughout Jubilee, Zauner pours her own life into the universe of each song to tell real stories, and allowing those universes, in turn, to fill in the details. Joy, change, evolution—these things take real time, and real effort. And Japanese Breakfast is here for it.