Japanese Breakfast, the musical project of Michelle Zauner, has announced Jubilee to be released on June 4th via Dead Oceans including the video directed by Zauner herself for its lead single, “Be Sweet”, a jagged and propulsive 80’s inspired pop song.
“After spending the last five years writing about grief, I wanted our follow up to be about joy. For me, a third record should feel bombastic and so I wanted to pull out all the stops for this one. I wrote “Be Sweet” with Jack Tatum from Wild Nothing a few years ago. I’ve been holding onto it for so long and am so excited to finally put it out there,” Zauner said.
Moreover, Zauner is releasing her long-awaited book based on her viral 2018 New Yorker essay, Crying In H Mart — the unflinching and powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity is due April 20th via Knopf.
Jubilee
As she was writing for her new album, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner knew that she wanted to call it Jubilee — caught from the word jubilee, a celebration of the passage of time-a festival to usher in the hope of a new era in brilliant technicolor.
With a joyful noise, Jubilee bursts with the most wide-ranging arrangements of Zauner’s career. Each song unfurls a new aspect of her artistry.
“I’ve never wanted to rest on any laurels. I wanted to push it as far as it could go, inviting more people in and pushing myself as a composer, a producer, an arranger,” Zauner on her effort to improve her range as a songwriter as she also took theory lessons and studied piano for the first time.
Jubilee is an album about processing life and love to attain happiness. Throughout Jubilee, Zauner is hardly fictionalizing her lyrics, instead pouring her own life into the universe of each song to tell real stories, and allowing those universes, in turn, to fill in the details. Joy, change, evolution-these things take real time, and real effort. And Japanese Breakfast is here for it.
Jubilee is available for pre-order now and due June 4th via Dead Oceans.
