THE MELANCHOLIC SOUND OF SUCCESS

After publishing a best-selling memoir and receiving two Grammy nominations for her album Jubilee, Michelle Zauner (also known as Japanese Breakfast) still felt sad—so she decided to write about it.

- BY SADIE BELL

In 2024, Michelle Zauner decided she needed a break and went to Korea. Over the year, the musician and author became a regular at classic Seoul eateries; studied Korean at Sogang University—and spent a lot of time allowing herself to be sad.

Though Zauner had been an indie pop star since her debut under the moniker Japanese Breakfast in 2016, it wasn’t until 2022 that she accomplished several other ambitions she’d long dreamed of: She released Crying in H Mart, a memoir about her mother’s death, to critical and award-winning acclaim. And her third album, Jubilee, earned her a mainstream fan base, plus two Grammy nominations for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album. Yet, she felt lost and unfulfilled.

She began grappling with her success. At the time, she was reading Frankenstein and was struck by how deeply she resonated with the titular mad scientist. “It was hard to not interpret it through the lens of what I was feeling, which was: I’m being consumed by my passions,” says Zauner over a Zoom from her home in Brooklyn, New York, on a mid-January afternoon.

Sitting with those feelings of sadness and desire, the 35-year-old crafted her new album For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), out March 21. The project, she says, was in part inspired by the European romanticism she saw in museums on tour and in a sweeping range of classic literature she’d read during her downtime, from Wuthering Heights to The Magic Mountain. (The LP’s “tongue in cheek” title is from a John Cheever short story.) Mostly, though, she thought of what one can do with their melancholy and what can come from it, like great art.