Japanese Breakfast

Japanese Breakfast make their long-awaited return to our shores with a gothic twist on their starry-eyed sound.

It’s officially JBrekkie season at RISING. Between adapting her best-selling memoir, Crying in H Mart, into a screenplay and heading to South Korea to write more, Michelle Zauner recorded her fourth full-length album as Japanese Breakfast, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women). Now she’s bringing her widescreen indie sound to the big stage at PICA, in her first Melbourne/Naarm show in eight years.

The latest Japanese Breakfast set is their follow-up to the disarmingly joyful post-lockdown LP Jubilee—with its gusts of horns and bubblegum synths. After a decade making the most of improvised recording spaces set in warehouses, trailers and lofts, this is the band’s first proper studio release. They’ve introduced the new era with a lush, moody ballad, ‘Orlando in Love’. It’s a stormy ode, inspired by a Renaissance poem, about a foolish man who lives in a Winnebago and gets seduced by a siren. And it’s pure Japanese Breakfast. Music that’s eclectic, elegant and alive with literary wit. Playful even when it’s dark. Willing to verge into dream pop, glide into shoegaze or do some tasteful rock theatrics, as the moment suits.

Moonstruck indie fans, unite. The table is set. Everybody wants to love you.