Japanese Breakfast Announces New Album & 2025 Tour

Japanese Breakfast is following up on 2021’s joyful Jubilee album with the indie band’s fourth album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women). Plus, the group led by front woman and songwriter Michelle Zauner has announced dates for a tour that starts in April with appearances at 2025’s Coachella.

The new album is due out March 21 via Dead Oceans. Though this is Japanese Breakfast’s fourth album, this marks the band’s first proper studio release, having previously recorded in warehouses, trailers and lofts. This time around Zauner & Co. recorded at the famed Sound City in Los Angeles, which birthed classic albums such as Neil Young’s After The Gold Rush, Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled album and Nirvana’s Nevermind. The LP was produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills, who has worked with artists including Bob Dylan and Fiona Apple.

For Melancholy Brunettes follows a period in Zauner’s life where she earned mainstream success including two nominations at the 2022 Grammy Awards for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album, along with acclaim for her bestselling 2021 memoir, “Crying In H Mart.” In 2022 she was also featured on the cover of Pollstar. A few days before speaking to Pollstar, former President Barack Obama released his highly anticipated “Favorite Books Of 2021” list, which included “Crying In H Mart.”

Reflecting on that time, Zauner said in a statement,: “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.”

An announcement from Japanese Breakfast’s team notes that “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.”

The announcement goes on to add, “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.”

Along with the album and tour news, Japanese Breakfast posted a lyric video today for the album’s lead single, Orlando in Love.” The tune is described as “a riff on John Cheever’s riff on Orlando Innamorato, an unfinished epic made up of 68 ½ cantos by the Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo — the hero is a well meaning poet who parks his Winnebago by the sea and falls victim to a siren’s call, his 69th canto (even in the lofty realm of classical myth Zauner has a soft spot for innuendo).”

The tour begins with two previously confirmed appearances at Coachella April 12 and 19, followed by an April 23 show at Moody Theater (ACL Live) in Austin, Texas. Check out the routing below, along with the lyric video.

Artist presales for the tour start Wednesday, Jan. 8th, with the general onsale starting Friday, Jan. 10th at 10 a.m. local time at japanesebreakfast.com/tour.

The 2025 trek marks the band’s first tour since 2021-2022’s Jubilee Tour. Reports submitted to Pollstar Boxoffice for Japanese Breakfast include an Oct. 5, 2023, show at Radio City Music Hall in New York that sold 5,898 tickets and grossed $384,420.

Japanese Breakfast is managed by Ten Atoms’ Ryan Matteson. The band is booked in North America by Ground Control Touring’s Timmy Hefner and Merrick Jarmulowicz.

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 2 – Chicago, IL @ Salt Shed *
May 3 – Detroit, MI @ The Fillmore *
May 5 – Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall *
May 7 – Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall at Fenway *
May 9 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount *
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 3 – London, UK @ O2 Academy Brixton
Jul 4-6 – Ewijk, NL @ Down The Rabbit Hole 2025
Jul 8 – Paris, FR @ Le Trianon
July 10-12 – Bilbao, ES @ Bilbao BBK Live
Aug 23 – Santa Barbara, CA @ Santa Barbara Bowl *
Aug 28 – San Francisco, CA @ The Masonic *
Aug 30 – Bend, OR @ Hayden Homes Amphitheater *
Sep 1 – Vancouver, BC @ Orpheum Theater *
Sep 6 – Denver, CO @ The Mission Ballroom *
Sep 9 – Minneapolis, MN @ The Palace Theater *

• w/ Ginger Root