For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)

About

The indie-pop band fronted by Michelle Zauner released their third album, 2021’s <i>Jubilee</i>, to massive critical acclaim and their first Grammy nomination. After spending five years writing <i>Crying in H Mart</i>, her best-selling memoir about grief, Zauner devoted the record to joy and catharsi, all triumphant horns and swooning synth. But for its follow-up, the ambitious polymath found herself drawn to darker, knottier themes—loneline, desire, contemporary masculinity. She also gravitated to the indie-rock sounds of her past, recruiting producer and guitarist Blake Mill, known for his work with artists like Fiona Apple, Feist, and Weyes Blood. “[For <i>Jubilee</i>] we wanted to have bombastic, big instrumentation with lots of strings and horns; I wanted this to come back to a more guitar-oriented record,” Zauner tells Apple Music. “I think I’m going back to my roots a little bit more.” When she began to write the band’s fourth record in 2022, Zauner found inspiration in an unlikely literary juxtaposition: Greek mythology, gothic romance classic, and works that she wryly deemed as part of the “incel canon” à la Bret Easton Ellis’ <i>American Psycho</i>. From such seemingly disparate sources emerged the gorgeously bleak songs of <i>For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)</i>, whose title is presented with an implied wink, acknowledging the many women songwriters whose work is reduced to “sad girl music.” Indeed, the atmosphere on <i>For Melancholy Brunettes</i> is less straightforwardly sad, and more…well, it’s complicated. On “Leda,” the story of a strained relationship unfolds by way of Greek myths in which Zeus takes the form of a swan to seduce a Spartan queen. “Little Girl,” a deceptively sweet-sounding ballad about a father estranged from his daughter, opens with a spectacularly abject image: “Pissing in the corner of a hotel suite.” And on the fascinatingly eerie “Mega Circuit,” on which legendary drummer Jim Keltner lays down a mean shuffle, Zauner paints a twisted tableau of modern manhood—muddy ATV, back-alley blowjob, “incel eunuchs”—somehow managing to make it all sound achingly poetic with lines like, “Deep in the soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded/Carrying dull prayers of old men cutting holier truth.” .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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