Anyone partial to a narrative arc that goes from struggle to tragedy to validation need look no further than Japanese Breakfast – an indie rock success story and literary sensation, currently on an extended victory lap around Europe. You might call them bounce-back specialists: they keep doing it. The five-strong touring band missed their Glastonbury slot a few days ago owing to travel delays from Luxembourg, but their chief creative, Michelle Zauner, is a sanguine and ebullient presence tonight. Encased in a shiny skirt and banging a large gong as the band strike up Paprika – a chamber-pop song about the contradictions of being a successful performer – she bounces sinuously around the stage. The song’s woozy marching-band feel is underlined by violin and saxophone. “I guess I’ll never get to Pilton,” Zauner quips.
Her star ascended slowly and painfully. After years trying to make it in bands, the musician moved back to Oregon in 2014 to be with her mother, who was dying of pancreatic cancer. That period of intensity, then mourning (she had also recently lost her aunt), gave birth to Zauner’s first two solo albums as Japanese Breakfast, Psychopomp (2016) – named for the mythological figures that guide the deceased on to the next life – and Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017), more sonically escapist.
One of Japanese Breakfast’s most enduring early bops, Everybody Wants to Love You, still feels like an instant classic in the tightly packed humidity of the Roundhouse. A little like Grimes fronting the Flaming Lips, the song is one the few Psychopomp tracks not about adjusting to loss. Zauner, who identifies as bisexual, has said its lustful lyric was written about a woman. The song’s arresting 2017 video, meanwhile, found Zauner dressed in her mother’s traditional Korean wedding finery, indulging in a variety of cliched American pastimes: eating burgers, chugging beers and playing a ferocious electric guitar solo on the bonnet of an 18-wheeler. (That solo remains on point tonight.) At its best, Zauner’s work remains a high-wire act that explores the faultlines between her two cultures (Korean and American) with curiosity, humour and courage. Her mother had never been keen on her music career, and a poignant sense of knowing irony is baked into Zauner’s output.
With her musical profile burgeoning, Zauner later turned to writing, receiving a number of rejections for her op-ed pieces about Korean food and sorrow. One she penned for the New Yorker became a celebrated memoir – Crying in H Mart – that spent 65 weeks on or near the top of the New York Times bestseller list. H Mart is an Asian-American supermarket chain; the book is, in great part, about Zauner’s fear of losing the Korean half of herself.
Band and book are twin projects that focus on loss and complicated mother-daughter relationships. But Zauner is also great at nuanced takes on oral sex on interstate exit ramps. Road Head, a dreamy, arpeggiating song anchored to a circular motif, finds her playing keyboards tonight, her vocals combining delicacy and control. As her mother was dying, Zauner married her partner, the band’s guitarist and keyboardist Peter Bradley, and the two briefly lean their foreheads together during Diving Woman, a powerful outro that references the female deep divers of South Korea while unspooling a heady motorik groove.
Japanese Breakfast is not, however, just a broth made from hot tears. In a conscious bid to move on from anguish, Zauner’s more joyous third album, Jubilee, was released in 2021; it counted its blessings and was nominated for a Grammy. Just as excitingly, the cloakroom of the Philadelphia venue where Zauner had once checked coats and sold pretzels was renamed in her honour that year, after Japanese Breakfast sold out five nights there. Crying in H Mart is now set to become a film; Zauner has written the screenplay. Earlier this year, she announced that The White Lotus actor Will Sharpe (British-Japanese, ex-Cambridge Footlights, ex-RSC) would direct. Earlier this month an open casting call went out to find an actor to play Zauner herself. Success, it seems, has bred success.
With all this glamour flying around, it’s comforting to see that she remains so committed to her first calling. Tonight’s set is expansive, and balances heartrending songs such as In Heaven with the slow-build of Posing for Cars, a highlight of the encore that begins with Zauner performing solo, with the rest of the band filtering in to lift the track to a crescendo.
One of the less ideal aspects of Japanese Breakfast’s work is how some of their gauzy songs lack musical impact; Zauner’s gut punches are largely lyrical. But she has turned even that to her advantage. One of tonight’s treats is Glider, a track from the soundtrack she wrote for the 2021 video game Sable – some of her most sophisticated output thus far, which moves away from workaday dreampop tropes into a shimmering, semi-electronic space.
And screens, large or small, have not turned her head entirely. Zauner is currently writing another Japanese Breakfast album; she debuts a new song tonight. The haunting Mega Circuit (it’s a working title) finds her playing acoustic guitar while a bandmate helps out on keys. Zauner, it seems, has had her fill of happiness. After a period of “so much joy”, she says in the song’s introduction, “I’m ready to go back to being a moody cunt again.”
