Michelle Zauner, sole creator of the indie pop project Japanese Breakfast, made 2016’s Psychopomp amid the death of her mother from cancer, a catastrophic event that can easily send anyone down an unfamiliar path. For Zauner, it meant an ongoing search for solace in loss. Soft Sounds From Another Planet continues that journey. It’s a somber, starry lullaby that results in periods of fitful sleep marked by struggles with fading love and death’s vague mystery. But there’s something comforting about the record too, with its interlocking muted chords, muffled drums, and sudden shocks of electric guitar that add sharp slices of lightning. Soft Sounds is full of pretty interludes of ambient noise mixed with shoegaze and electropop touches.
The Body Is A Blade from the new album, “Soft Sounds From Another Planet” out now Dead Oceans Records.
Michelle Zauner introduced the arrival of “Soft Sounds From Another Planet” the new album from Japanese Breakfast, with short video, that hinted at an intergalactic theme. Fittingly, she had initially set out to write a sci-fi concept album about a woman who, after falling in love with a robot and experiencing heartbreak, enlists in the Mars One project.
The plan only carried through to the lead single, “Machinist,” but the theme of exploring the great beyond prevails throughout the album. The concept allowed Zauner to play with new elements that vastly differ from her punk roots in Little Big League throughout the record, autotune and synthesizers create an otherworldly ambience. Even the re-worked version of a Little Big League song, “Boyish,” sounds like something entirely new.
What started as a fantastic theme gradually became a metaphor for the fear of death. Zauner explores that idea in full on “Till Death,” a hauntingly beautiful song that details the aftermath of losing someone dear: “Haunted dreams / Stages of grief / Repressed memories / Anger and bargaining.” On her debut as JapaneseBreakfast, “Psychopomp” Zauner had grappled with losing her mother to cancer. Now, onSoft Sounds, she reflects on the person she’s become, after surviving through the pain.
Japanese Breakfast’s ‘Soft Sounds From Another Planet’ is less of a concept album about space exploration so much as it is a mood board come to life. Over the course of 12 tracks, Michelle Zauner explores a sonic landscape of her own design, one that’s big enough to contain her influences. There are songs on this album that recall the pathos of Roy Orbison’s ballads, while others could soundtrack a cinematic drive down one of Blade Runner’s endless skyways. Zauner’s voice is capacious; one moment she’s serenading the past, the next she’s robotically narrating a love story over sleek monochrome, her lyrics more pointed and personal than ever before. While ‘Psychopomp’ was a genre-spanning introduction to Japanese Breakfast, this visionary sophomore album launches the project to new heights.
Japanese Breakfast is Michelle Zauner’s first solo project since fronting the Philadelphian bands Little BigLeague and Post Post . The songs on Psychopomp were written over the past six years, some after the passing of her mom.
Her song, “Jane Cum,” is a dark meditation on love lost. The video, directed by Adam Kolodny, captures that longing—bright headlights cut through black woods, a chip of quartz sparkles in the sun, and a coven of witches carry out a clandestine ritual. Premiering today, “Jane Cum” offers a peek at the delicate balance of Japanese Breakfast’s last album: sometimes light as a feather, other times dark as night.
Sometimes the only way to deal with devastating tragedy is to turn it into something beautiful, and JapaneseBreakfast’s Michelle Zauner does exactly that on the gorgeously dream-hazed Psychopomp. With soft-focus drum loops and gauzy synths, the former indie rocker pays tribute to a mom who was claimed by cancer, while, in the larger picture, reminding us that the pain one day fades but the good memories don’t.
Japanese Breakfast, aka Michelle Zauner, has released a new single, “Boyish,” from her forthcoming album, Soft Sounds from Another Planet, which is set to release on July 14th via Dead Oceans. The song is a slow-paced plea for love with a melodic, chorus-filled guitar solo and despondent lyrics.
“Craig Hendrix and I wanted to produce this sort of grandiose Roy Orbison-esque ballad,” said Zauner. “We wanted the chorus to have big arrangements, lots of harmonies and synth strings, to create a really sweeping, melancholic effect that mirrored the nature of the lyrics. The song is about jealousy and sexual incompetence. It’s about feeling ugly.”
Michelle Zauner’s music as Japanese Breakfast plunges headfirst into some of the darkest experiences in human life and finds glimmers of bright light around the fringe. trying to describe its genre, but trying to pin down Zauner’s style can be as fruitless as attempting to make sense of the sadness and loss that inspired her new album “Psychopomp” . As with those sensations, it might be more productive to just let this music wash over you than to understand its inner workings. It’s as fluid, expansive, and gorgeous piece of work as its subject matter demands.
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