Japanese Breakfast Shares New Single 'Mega Circuit' & Expands 2025 Tour Dates
Listen to the new single from Japanese Breakfast now.
By: Josh Sharpe Feb. 13, 2025
Japanese Breakfast shares “Mega Circuit,” the fierce new single from her recently announced new album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), due March 21st on Dead Oceans.
“‘Mega Circuit’ was one of the first songs I wrote, intent on making a creepier, more guitar driven record,” Zauner explains. “The song is sort of an examination of contemporary masculinity, and explores a conflicted desire to embrace a generation that in the absence of positive role models has found refuge in violence and bigotry. We had the legendary Jim Keltner—who’s played on everything from ‘These Days,’ to ‘Here You Come Again’ to ‘Dream Weaver’—come in and play the fiercest shuffle you’ve ever heard.”
“Mega Circuit” follows the release of “Orlando In Love,” the album’s acclaimed lead single which the band performed a stunning rendition of on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon last week.
Japanese Breakfast is also expanding her tour in support of For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) with recently announced shows in Seattle, WA and Madison, WI as well as additional dates in Brooklyn, NY and Bristol, UK. The tour 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. All tour dates can be found below and tickets are on-sale now via japanesebreakfast.rocks.
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.”
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 1 - Chicago, IL @ Salt Shed *
May 2 - Chicago, IL @ Salt Shed * - SOLD OUT
May 3 - Detroit, MI @ The Fillmore *
May 5 - Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall *
May 6 - Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall *
May 7 - Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall at Fenway *
May 9 - Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount * - SOLD OUT
May 10 - Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount * - SOLD OUT
May 11 - Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount *
May 12 - Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount *
May 15 - Philadelphia, PA @ The Met Philadelphia Presented by Highmark *
May 16 - Philadelphia, PA @ The Met Philadelphia Presented by Highmark *
Jun 21 - Milwaukee, WI @ Summerfest
Jun 24 - Oslo, NO @ Rockefeller
Jun 25 - Stockholm, SE @ Filadelfia
Jun 26 - Copenhagen, DK @ VEGA
Jun 29 - Manchester, UK @ Academy 1
Jun 30 - Glasgow, UK @ Barrowland
Jul 1 - Bristol, UK @ O2 Academy Bristol
Jul 3 - London, UK @ O2 Academy Brixton
Jul 4-6 - Ewijk, NL @ Down The Rabbit Hole 2025
Jul 5 - Utrecht, NL @ TivoliVredenburg
Jul 8 - Paris, FR @ Le Trianon
July 10-12 - Bilbao, ES @ Bilbao BBK Live
Aug 23 - Santa Barbara, CA @ Santa Barbara Bowl *
Aug 27 - San Francisco, CA @ The Masonic *
Aug 28 - San Francisco, CA @ The Masonic * - SOLD OUT
Aug 30 - Bend, OR @ Hayden Homes Amphitheater *
Sep 1 - Vancouver, BC @ Orpheum Theater *
Sep 2 - Seattle, WA @ Woodland Park Zoo *
Sep 3 - Seattle, WA @ Woodland Park Zoo *
Sep 6 - Denver, CO @ The Mission Ballroom *
Sep 9 - St Paul, MN @ The Palace Theater *
Sep 10 - Madison, WI @ The Sylvee *
* w/ Ginger Root
Though Zauner has experimented with science fiction on Soft Sounds from Another Planet and buoyant surrealism on Jubilee, the landscape of European Romanticism that underpins For Melancholy Brunettes and the dense tissue of classical allusion that comes with it marks new territory for a songwriter entering her artistic maturity. She credits a range of antecedents with inspiration. The forlorn café girl in Degas’ “L’absinthe”. The seascapes of Caspar David Friedrich. The passionate longing and wild, undulating moors in Wuthering Heights. Hans Castorp wrapped in his camel hair blanket, dreaming on the Berghof balcony. It is an atmosphere made palpable by the intricate, interlocking guitar arrangements that accompany much of the record, lapping like waves over the meter, often as oblique in their expression of the chord as Zauner can be in her polyvalence of feeling and insight.
Sadness is the dominant emotional key of this record, but it is sadness of a rarified form: the pensive, prescient sadness of melancholy, in which the recognition of life’s essentially tragic character occurs with sensitivity to its fleeting beauty. Zauner finds space enough inside it for glimmers of hope. They are the consolations of mortals that poets before her have called out to and that poets after will continue to rediscover: love and labor, and though they run like tonic resolutions through the record’s many episodes.
Photo Credit: Pak Bae
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