After a decade of making the most of improvised recording spaces set in warehouses, trailers and lofts,Japanese Breakfast’s fourth album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), due on March 21, through Dead Oceans. The album marks the band’s first proper studio release and it was produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills.

The upcoming record sees frontwoman and songwriter Michelle Zauner pull back from the bright extroversion that defined its predecessor Jubilee to examine the darker waves that roil within the moody fecund field of melancholy, which has been long held to be the psychic state of poets on the verge of inspiration. The result is an artistic statement of purpose, which is  a mature, intricate and contemplative work that conjures the romantic thrill of a gothic novel.

The plight of Icarus and other such condemned ones lends For Melancholy Brunettes its most persistent theme, which is the perils of desire. Like light dispersed, its spectral parts take the album’s characters through cycles of temptation, transgression and retribution.

On the album’s lead single, “Orlando in Love,” John Cheever’s guitar riff on Orlando Innamorato is an unfinished epic made up of 68 ½ cantos by the Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo, who is a hero and a poet that parks his Winnebago by the sea and falls victim to a siren’s call that is his 69th canto.

For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) Tracklist

1. Here is Someone
2. Orlando in Love
3. Honey Water
4. Mega Circuit
5. Little Girl
6. Leda
7. Picture Window
8. Men in Bars (Feat. Jeff Bridges)
9. Winter in LA
10. Magic Mountain

Photo Credit: Kalyn Oyer