Japanese Breakfast

Since 2013 · United States

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Jubilee (2021)

Jubilee opens with a full horn section, a deliberate statement of intent after two albums built mostly around hushed dream-pop textures. "Be Sweet" pairs a driving, synth-pop groove with lyrics about trust and self-doubt, Zauner's voice more confident and forward in the mix than on her earlier, grief-centered records. "Kokomo, IN" shows the album's gentler side, a soft ballad sung from someone else's perspective. The whole record reads as a deliberate turn toward joy and abundance after two albums spent almost entirely inside loss.

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Japanese Breakfast

Jubilee · 2021

Michelle Zauner began recording as Japanese Breakfast following the death of her mother, channeling that grief into two albums, Psychopomp (2016) and Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017), that combined dream-pop textures with unusually direct lyrics about loss. She became more widely known in subsequent years both for her music and for her memoir Crying in H Mart, which expanded on the same material in prose.

Jubilee (2021) marked a deliberate turn away from that grief-focused songwriting toward a brighter, more maximalist pop sound, incorporating horns, synthesizers, and a wider emotional range than her earlier records had allowed herself. The shift was framed explicitly by Zauner as a choice to write about joy after years spent writing almost exclusively about loss, and the record was received as a significant creative expansion rather than a departure from what had made her music distinctive.