Michelle Zauner Stares Down the Darkness

Michelle Zauner wants to set the record straight: She is not trying to reclaim the label “sad girl music.” Since announcing the title of her highly anticipated fourth studio album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), the author, director, and front woman of indie-pop band Japanese Breakfast has been surprised to see how divisive the title has become, and the assumptions it’s given way to. Some thought she was writing a collection of sad breakup songs; others that she was taking ownership of a label that has previously been wielded with the intent to belittle or insult.

“I think [the album title] was a little bit tongue-in-cheek,” Zauner says with a chuckle over Zoom in early February. “And it was maybe taken very literally.” 

“Sad girl music” is a fraught subject, and Zauner chooses her words carefully. “I don’t want to get into trouble,” she says, explaining that a lot of brilliant women songwriters get unfairly punted into that category. And it’s true: the music industry and the internet have made a nasty habit of reducing songwriting by women that deals with complex emotions in this way—Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, and Lana Del Rey have had to fend off these degrading designations for years.

Zauner, though, is interested to see what people will say once they’ve had a listen to the project in its entirety. With the album due March 21, Zauner, 35, finds herself in a constant state of “caring, then not caring, and then pretending to care.” Her mood matches the weather outside our windows: “I’m a winter person in the sense that I feel like I must suffer through something to enjoy the coming season,” she says and laughs heartily. The stakes feel high after her past few years. For Melancholy Brunettes arrives four years after Zauner’s rise from indie-music darling to literary heavyweight with the release of her wildly successful, gut-punching memoir Crying in H Mart, which explored her Korean American identity and her relationship with her late mother Chongmi, who died of cancer in 2014. Written in arresting, empathetic prose, it became an instant New York Times best seller and is currently in its 39th printing.

Read More: Michelle Zauner Is on the 2022 TIME 100 List

Zauner followed up Crying in H Mart with Japanese Breakfast’s third studio album, Jubilee. Unlike the book, the album took a sharp turn away from grief into cathartic joy, blending dreamy synth-pop chords with shoe-gaze sensibilities. It was equally met with critical success, earning the group nominations for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album at the 2022 Grammys.

For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), though, is worlds away from the sonic landscape of Jubilee. It’s not quite in the sphere of Crying in H Mart, either. Here, Zauner is exploring something bleaker—crueler and more punishing. She’s trying to see what darkness, of all different kinds, looks like when you stare it right in the face.

When I ask what comes to mind when Zauner thinks of melancholy brunettes, she excitedly whips out her phone to rattle off some references: Paintings like L’Absinthe by Edgar Degas, Tired by Ramón Casas, and The Wedding Dress by Frederick Elwell—all interpretations of women experiencing massive despair—were hugely informative to the record. They were especially important to the album art, which sees Zauner looking like a gothic, Brontëesque character, face down on a table surrounded by a plentiful feast. “I like the idea of being someone just collapsed on a table, surrounded by a wealth of goods. Like a spoiled prince or something,” she explains.

When Zauner began writing For Melancholy Brunettes in the winter of 2022, she was clear that she wanted to do something from a more introspective place. She wanted to write songs that were also more guitar-focused, compared to Jubilee’s lush horns and slinky synths, and teamed up with producer Blake Mills (who, among his vast repertoire of acts, has worked with other virtuosic rock acts like Fiona Apple, Perfume Genius, and Alabama Shakes) to record the album at Sound City in Los Angeles—making it the band’s first proper studio release after working on their first three records with friends in makeshift recording studios.

As she began piecing the songs together, Zauner was also reading—a lot. She wanted to explore how the concept of melancholy has evolved in stories of love and longing, society and familial relationships over time. She worked her way from European Romanticism to Greek mythology before turning to Gothic Romance classics like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenstein, and even modernist staples like The Magic Mountain by German author Thomas Mann, which is her husband and fellow bandmate Peter Bradley’s favorite book and directly inspired a song on the album.

She also became increasingly fascinated with works “that could be categorized as part of the incel canon,” Zauner says—books that the mostly male subculture of self-described “involuntary celibates” has glorified for their depiction of loneliness and manhood—think American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Zauner hoped to better understand why this type of “confused masculinity” and Joker-like anger and loneliness emerges; how these aggrieved and occasionally violent men process the world.

“If I look back at my very early work, it’s always been [there]—this fear of men,” she says. “There is this disappointment and fear of men, and these creepy stories—like an ominous thing has happened or is about to happen—that threads the songs together.”

Indeed, listening to the new album feels not unlike you’re Cathy (or Heathcliff) staring at the misty English moors, as impending doom envelops you from all angles: On “Honey Water,” a woman finds herself in a marriage to a slimy, unfaithful man, and equates him to a thirsty bug. On “Mega Circuit,” a lustful spectator watches a gang of incels meander around over a feverish, sinister guitar shuffle. On “Little Girl,” perhaps one of the most devastating ballads on the record, a father, urinating in a corner of a lonely hotel room, wonders how he became estranged from his daughter. (“Seven years of running at this breakneck speed/ Convalescing cheaply far abroad/ Dreaming of a daughter who won’t speak to me/ Running for her father coming home.”) Dramatic as they may seem, these sentiments are strikingly relatable—feelings of yearning and amorphous despair on an album releasing in the middle of a public-health crisis of loneliness.

The lyrics, the storytelling, the sparse, meticulous melodies—it’s all so beautifully punishing, and that is exactly the point.

After her mom died, Zauner says, she “became very work-obsessed.” While work was a grounding force, it came at a cost: “I kind of lost track of any form of self-care or personal life, or family and friends.” Following the release of Crying in H Mart and then Jubilee (and a much-needed sabbatical in Korea), Zauner found herself thinking about what it means to be a creative working woman in her mid-30s—the price one pays for their ambitions. It was playing on Zauner’s mind a lot as she was making For Melancholy Brunettes, especially when she thought about balancing her work with expanding her family.

“There is this anticipatory grief about wanting to become a mother and having to reckon with the creative loss that that will usher in,” Zauner says. “I was thinking about how much I’ve excused men for poor behavior because of their positions of power and the work that they’ve had to do to provide for their family.” Now, as Zauner has grown into her creative career, she questions the elusive balancing act between the “narcissism that comes with being an artist and [the desire to be] a good human being.”

It’s what drew her to write the album’s lead single, “Orlando in Love.” Inspired by John Cheever’s nod to Orlando Innamorato, an unfinished epic poem by the Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo, the song is a story about “a foolish, romantic guy” who succumbs to a siren’s call, and in some ways, Zauner’s personal reflection on success. “You’re pursuing your dreams in a very foolhardy way, and sometimes you’re punished for just how straight you’re going with it,” she says. “Like, if you go too far in your ambitions, it likely will not end well.”

The 2025 Grammys happened a week before Zauner and I spoke, and the internet was still buzzing not only from Beyoncé’s finally winning Album of the Year, but another artist who unequivocally spoke their mind that night: Chappell Roan. Roan, who received the Grammy for Best New Artist, got up to the podium and called out the record industry for not supporting emerging artists with necessities like a livable wage and health insurance. When Zauner heard this, she immediately took to X to congratulate Roan, writing, “f-ck ya Chappell!!!!!” That got her in a bit of trouble: some people interpreted “ya” to mean an insulting “you” instead of an enthusiastic “yes.” Zauner couldn’t believe it.

Read More: Leave Chappell Roan Alone

“Let the record show that I thought it was amazing, and I think it’s so ridiculous how much crap she has to endure for all of the good that she’s putting into the world. She inspires me to be a more outspoken, braver artist,” Zauner says. Having been nominated in the same category, she finds it a bit funny that these award shows so aggressively avoid naming the problems that plague the same industry they are celebrating. But Roan, she says, “very eloquently and very courageously said exactly what the problem is.” 

Perhaps that’s what For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is trying to do, too. Naming the problem—and hoping that despite the scars, the battle wounds, the punishment, and the castigations, we’ll all come out the other end into the light.