The memento mori art inspiring Japanese Breakfast's new album

Three days into 2025, singer Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast posted a carousel of soft paintings of women looking seemingly sad. Viewers were immersed in a world of folded heads, empty stares, and slouched postures. On January 7th, she announced her fourth record, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women). The album cover pictures Zauner lying face down on top of a feast of fruit, meat, bread, and wine beside a skull, like a 17th-century Dutch vanitas still life. These overindulgent tableaus heavily featured the lauded memento mori tradition, referencing mortality with objects.

On a livestream for lead single, 'Orlando In Love,' Michelle commented, 'I knew for a really long time that I wanted the album cover to be an image of me passed out on a table, sort of looking like… I’ve over-consumed my fill… fatigued with melancholy… The cover feels like I have everything I want, which was sort of how I was feeling while writing this record.'

If you’re just being introduced to Japanese Breakfast, the feeling Michelle refers to is the success she found in 2021 when she released her third album Jubilee alongside her first memoir Crying in H Mart. The album went on to earn two Grammy nominations, and the book became a New York Times best-seller. Within a year, she was sky-rocketed into mainstream success, far beyond her DIY roots. A life-changing year that could understandably produce a wave of melancholic emotions.

Zauner’s album art reminds me of Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 hit novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The book cover depicts a well-to-do yet sullen dark-haired woman slumped in a chair. An original painting titled Portrait of a Young Woman in White, circa 1798, by an unknown artist, the image perfectly describes the novel’s privileged and drug-induced 2000s protagonist. While 200 years apart, the archetype of the modern woman through a neoclassical lens prevails.

Japanese Breakfast’s historical references continue throughout her campaign. In the music video for 'Orlando In Love,' we glimpse Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, and in the live performance on Jimmy Fallon, an ode to friars and Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo. A week after Zauner, indie peer Lucy Dacus announced Forever Is A Feeling, with a framed painted portrait of herself as the cover. In the music video for single, 'Ankles,' Dacus is a woman from a Renaissance painting, brought to life. During her Jimmy Fallon performance, we see the gold frame from the album cover enlarged to great heights, surrounding Dacus. And on February 28th, Panda Bear released new album, Sinister Grift featuring a painting of another brunette with a troubled expression as the cover. In an age of endless screens, artists are looking to the past for inspiration, to the birth of painting, a pre-Internet era, where everything was new.

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