Japanese Breakfast Details New Album 'For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)' and 2025 Tour Dates

After a decade making the most of improvised recording spaces set in warehouses, trailers and lofts, Japanese Breakfast’s fourth album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), due March 21st on Dead Oceans, marks the band’s first proper studio release.

Produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills — an innovator of uncommon subtlety, known for his work with everyone from Bob Dylan to Fiona Apple and quietly regarded as many a legacy artist’s favorite guitar player — and tracked at the venerable Sound City in Los Angeles — birthplace of After The Gold Rush, Fleetwood Mac and Nevermind among other classics — the record sees front-woman and songwriter Michelle Zauner pull back from the bright extroversion that defined its predecessor Jubilee to examine 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. The result is an artistic statement of purpose: a mature, intricate, contemplative work that conjures the romantic thrill of a gothic novel.

For Melancholy Brunettes follows a transformative period in Zauner’s life during which her GRAMMY nominated breakthrough album Jubilee and her bestselling memoir Crying In H Mart catapulted her into the cultural mainstream, delivering on her deepest artistic ambitions. 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.” 

The plight of Icarus and other such condemned ones lends For Melancholy Brunettes its most persistent theme, the perils of desire. Like light dispersed, its spectral parts take the album’s characters through cycles of temptation, transgression and retribution. On the album’s lead single “Orlando in Love” — 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 (even in the lofty realm of classical myth Zauner has a soft spot for innuendo).

Additionally, Japanese Breakfast is announcing a 2025 tour in support of For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) that kicks off with a performance at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in Indio, CA and continues with headline shows across North America and Europe this year. The Melancholy Tour is the band’s first tour in three years, following the Jubilee Tour in 2022. Artist pre-sales begin tomorrow, January 8th, with general on-sale going up on, Friday, January 10th at 10 am local time. All dates below. 

TRACK LIST: 

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

TOUR DATES:

Apr 12 & 19 - Indio, CA @ Coachella Music and Arts Festival

Apr 23 - Austin, TX @ Moody Theater (ACL Live) *

Apr 24 - Dallas, TX @ South Side Ballroom

Apr 26 - Atlanta, GA @ Tabernacle *

Apr 27 - Charlotte, NC @ The Fillmore *

Apr 28 - Nashville, TN @ Ryman Auditorium *

May 3 - Detroit, MI @ The Fillmore *

May 5 - Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall *

May 7 - Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall at Fenway *

May 9 - Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount *

May 16 - Philadelphia, PA @ The Met *

Jun 24 - Oslo @ Rockefeller

Jun 25 - Stockholm @ Filadelfia

Jun 26 - Copenhagen @ VEGA

Jun 29 - Manchester @ Academy 1

Jun 30 - Glasgow @ Barrowland

Jul 3 - London @ O2 Academy Brixton

Jul 4-6 - Ewijk @ Down The Rabbit Hole 2025

Jul 8 - Paris @ Le Trianon

Jul 10-12 - Bilbao, ES @ Bilbao BBK Live

Aug 20 - San Diego, CA @ Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre *

Aug 28 - San Francisco, CA @ The Masonic *

Aug 30 - Bend, OR @ Hayden Homes Amphitheater *

Sep 1 - Vancouver, BC @ Orpheum Theater *

Sep 9 - Minneapolis, MN @ The Armory *

Photo Credit: Pak Bae

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