Wenn das kein Grund zur Freude ist: Michelle Zauner alias JAPANESE BREAKFAST kündigt mit „Jubilee“ den mit Spannung erwarteten Nachfolger des 2017 erschienenen und von der Kritik gefeierten Albums „Soft Sounds From Another Planet“ an. Zeitgleich zur Ankündigung präsentiert die Amerikanerin schon diese Woche die Lead-Single „Be Sweet“ (VÖ: 02.03. um 16:00 Uhr) , einem zackigen sowie treibenden, von den 80er Jahren inspirierten Popsong und Ohrwurm erster Güte.
Zauner über den ungewohnt poppigen Track: "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."
Von dem Moment an, als Michelle Zauner mit dem Schreiben ihres dritten Albums begann, war klar, dass es nur „Jubilee“ heißen konnte. Schließlich feiert ein Jubiläum die vergangene Zeit und blickt optimistisch in die Zukunft. Ein Fest der Hoffnung und Verheißung, das zugleich eine neue Ära in (hoffentlich) brillanten Farben einläutet. Auf ihren ersten beiden Alben wurde Zauner für die Auseinandersetzung mit ihren Ängsten gelobt: Das Debüt „Psychopomp“ entstand während der Krebsbehandlung von Zauners Mutter, während der epische Nachfolger „Soft Sounds From Another Planet“ den Verlust dieser verarbeitet.
Jetzt, zu Beginn einer neuen Dekade, ist Zauner bereit für ihr Glück - ein rares Gut in einer scheinbar zerfallenden Welt - zu kämpfen. „Jubilee“ strotzt nur so vor den bombastischsten Arrangements in ihrer Karriere. Jeder Song entfaltet einen neuen Aspekt ihres beeindruckenden Könnens. Joyful noise!
„Jubilee“ ist ein Album über die Verarbeitung des Lebens und der Liebe, während man auf der Suche nach Glück ist. Ein Prozess, der uns manchmal dazu zwingt, aus uns selbst herauszutreten und aus einem neuen Blickwinkel zu betrachten. Auf „Jubilee“ fiktionalisiert Zauner ihre Texte kaum noch, und gießt stattdessen ihr eigenes Leben in das Universum jedes Songs, um so echte Geschichten zu erzählen. Passend dazu veröffentlich Zauner außerdem beim New Yorker Knopf-Verlag Ende April ihre Memoiren „Crying In H Mart“, die hierzulande ab Mitte Mai auf Englisch erhältlich sein werden.
In den Jahren zuvor nahm Zauner außerdem Theoriestunden und lernte zum ersten Mal ernsthaft Klavier, um so ihre Bandbreite als Songwriterin zu verbessern: "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." Das ist ihr auf „Jubilee“ mehr als gelungen.
Freude, Veränderung, (Weiter-)Entwicklung - diese Dinge erfordern echte Zeit, und wahre Anstrengung. Und Japanese Breakfast gibt sich dem vollkommen hin.
From the moment she began writing her new album, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner knew that she wanted to call it Jubilee. After all, a jubilee is a celebration of the passage of time—a festival to usher in the hope of a new era in brilliant technicolor. Zauner’s first two albums garnered acclaim for the way they grappled with anguish; Psychopompwas written as her mother underwent cancer treatment, while Soft Sounds From Another Planettook the grief she held from her mother‘s death and used it as a conduit to explore the cosmos. Now, at the start of a new decade, Japanese Breakfast is ready to fight for happiness, an all-too-scarce resource in our seemingly crumbling world.How does she do it? With a joyful noise. From pulsing walls of synthgaze and piano on “Sit,” to the nostalgia-laden strings that float through “Tactics,” Jubilee bursts with the most wide-ranging arrangements of Zauner’s career. Each song unfurls a new aspect of her artistry: “Be Sweet,” co-written with Wild Nothing’s Jack Tatum, is a jagged, propulsive piece of ‘80s pop that’s followed by a sweetly melancholic ballad in “Kokomo, IN.” As she rides a crestof saxophones and synthesizers through “Slide Tackle,” a piece of nimble pop-funk run through a New Order lens, Zauner professes her desire to move forward: “I want to be good—I want to navigate this hate in my heart somewhere better.”In the years leading up to Jubilee, Zauner also took theory lessons and studied piano in earnest for the first time, in an effort to improve her range as a songwriter: “I’ve never wanted to rest on any laurels. I wanted to push it as far as it could go, inviting more peoplein and pushing myself as a composer, a producer, an arranger.” She pours that sentiment into the album from the very beginning, weaving a veritable tapestry of sound on the opening track “Paprika.” To build such an anthem of self-actualization, Zauner maxed out the technical limits of her recording rig, expelling her anxieties and egoism with layers upon layers of triumphant horns and marching snares. “How’s it feel to be at the center of magic? To linger in tones and words?” she ponders, conjuring the
widescreen majesty of Kate Bush. “I opened the floodgates and found no water, no current, no river, no rush!”Later, on the kooky, terrifyingly prophetic jam, “Savage Good Boy,” Zauner reduces the excess of modern capitalism to an emotional level, sarcastically imagining the perspective of a billionaire trying to convince his lover to join him underground as the apocalypse unfolds. “I want to make the money until there’s no more to be made/And we will be so wealthy, I’m absolved from questioning/That all my bad behavior was just a necessary strain/They’re the stakes in a race to win.”“I don’t want to weave politics into my music in a way that feels cheap, but I couldn't make something that doesn’t comment on the reality we live in,” says Zauner. “I think that you need to push yourself to care, and that’s part of what this album is about: If you want change, in anything, you need to go to war for it.”At the end comes “Posing for Cars,” one of the longest, most visceral Japanese Breakfast songs to date. In its muted opening, Zauner quietly re-embraces impassioned facets of youth—wistful daydreaming, fierce loyalty—atop a bed of slowly-strummed guitars. Those same feelings pour out of her fingertips as she erupts into a cathartic, nearly three-minute-long solo to close out the record, with gradual swells of distortion that evoke the arena-sized guitars of bands like Wilco or Sonic Youth.Jubileeis an album about processing life and love in the quest for happiness, and how that process sometimes requires us to step outside of ourselves. “Savage Good Boy” isn’t the only time Zauner takes on a persona; On the cavernous masterpiece “Posing In Bondage,” she imagines a woman left behind in the confines of an empty house, traversing the blurred lines between domesticity and dominance as she sings to an absent lover. Meanwhile, “Kokomo, IN” was written from the perspective of a small-town Indiana boy, forced to say goodbye to a girlfriend who’s shipping off to study abroad. But 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.