Japanese Breakfast Announces New Album and First Tour in Three Years

Japanese Breakfast are back, releasing their fourth album For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) on March 21 via Dead Oceans and hitting the road after a three year hiatus with a 2025 tour spanning North America and Europe. The band shared the news today along with their lush, sweeping lead single “Orlando in Love.”

The new album, which was recorded at Los Angeles’ Sound City and produced by Grammy winner Blake Mills (Fiona Apple, Bob Dylan), draws from European Romanticism and classical myths to explore how our own desires can trap us. Japanese Breakfast frontwoman Michelle Zauner knows this ironic truth firsthand. The impressive author, singer, songwriter and composer’s last record, Jubilee, earned her a Grammy nomination, and her hit memoir Crying in H Mart (which is being adapted into a film directed by Will Sharpe) means that even your mom’s heard of Zauner. Still, this heightened level of fame after years of being an indie darling was jarring for her. “I felt seduced by getting what I always wanted. I was flying too close to the sun, and I realized if I kept going I was going to die,” Zauner says. 

“Orlando in Love” fleshes out this theme, following a poet who’s mesmerized by a siren’s song, until he ends up “breathless and then drowned.” The track begins with warm acoustic guitar, so close it’s like a seashell being held up to your ear, until a sweet swell of strings washes in after the first stanza. The titular Orlando is a reference to Renaissance author Matteo Maria Boiardo’s epic poem Orlando Innamorato (literally, “Orlando in Love”). It’s a sumptuous, cerebral peek into what we might expect from an album with a track title potentially referencing Zeus’ paramour Leda and another song featuring the one and only Jeff Bridges.

Watch the lyric video for “Orlando in Love” and check out the album art and tracklist for Japanese Breakfast’s For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) below, as well as the tour dates further down. Artist pre-sales starts tomorrow, and the general tour sale kicks off on Friday, January 10 at 10am local time.