March 21 street date. After a decade making the most of improvised recording spaces set in warehouses, trailers, and lofts, Japanese Breakfast's fourth album, "For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)", marks the band's first proper studio release. Produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills, the record sees front-woman 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, long held to be the psychic state of poets on the verge of inspiration. The result is an artistic statement of purpose: a mature, intricate, contemplative work that conjures the romantic thrill of a gothic novel. "For Melancholy Brunettes" follows a transformative period in Zauner's life during which her 2xGrammy nominated breakthrough album "Jubilee" and her bestselling memoir "Crying In H Mart" catapulted her into the cultural mainstream, delivering on her deepest artistic ambitions. Sadness is indeed 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. View all titles by this artist