Released March 2025
★★★★☆
What a band.
Michelle Zauner has always written as though caught between two worlds: the luminous and the shadowed, the tender and the devastating. On Jubilee (2021), she tilted toward the light, making a record that shimmered with optimism, brass horns and sparkling hooks lifting her voice into near-pop ecstasy. Four years later, Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) chooses a somewhat different palette: darker, candlelit, steeped in myth and archetype.
With its 10 songs, clocking in at just over 30 minutes, it is not a retreat but a deepening, an album that makes melancholy feel not like defeat but like art, romantic in the truest sense of the word. It is gorgeous.
A Twilight World
The production, crafted with Blake Mills at Sound City, is luxurious and precise, but never overbearing. Celesta, pedal steel, strings, and woodwinds all find their place, creating textures that feel like painted frescos rather than rock arrangements. Zauner’s voice doesn’t so much dominate as hover, almost spectral, guiding the listener through a world that feels half-dreamed.
Lyrically, she has moved away from the autobiographical detail of her earlier records. Instead, she builds her songs around timeless figures: lovers at vigils, mythic falls, fractured reflections.
The result is a record that feels larger than life but still painfully intimate.
Track by Track
1. Here Is Someone
The opener establishes the album’s ethos with disarming simplicity: life is suffused with sadness, yet companionship offers a fragile consolation (“Watching you from the yard. Life is sad, but here is someone… someone”). Celesta notes sparkle like glass, strings unfurl slowly, and Zauner’s voice delivers the refrain with poise. It’s less catharsis than acknowledgment — the kind of resignation that feels oddly comforting.
2. Orlando in Love
The lead single, brimming with Renaissance imagery and Shakespearean longing. Orlando is overwhelmed by desire – Zauner sings not as herself but through this mythic character, giving the song a theatrical grandeur. Sweeping strings and woodwinds echo the turmoil, creating a tableau of passion and ruin.
3. Honey Water
A bitter pivot. Here, sweetness curdles into venom. Love is described as honey that now chokes, the seduction turned suffocating. The guitars grind, the rhythm pushes forward, and Zauner’s voice sharpens to accusation (“Why can’t you be faithful? Why won’t you believe? They say only love can change a man. But all that changes is me”). It’s the most rock-driven moment on the album, a catharsis of betrayal and bite. I love it (Michelle shreds!).
4. Mega Circuit
Mechanical and fractured, this track depicts exhaustion in the face of repetition. The lyrics are clipped, almost like static transmissions, conjuring the endless loop of performance and fame. The production turns metallic, glitchy, breaking from the album’s lushness to emphasize alienation.
5. Little Girl
One of the record’s most intimate songs. Zauner sketches scenes of family distance and fading innocence, opening with an image of dislocation in a hotel room (“Pissing in the corner of a hotel suite. Do you always remember where you are?”). The whole thing is tender but uneasy, as if speaking from across time to a younger self or a distant relative. (Father: “All I need is understanding. Pretty girl in my arms. Passing days, immolation. Little girl, meant no harm.”) The instrumentation remains hushed, leaving the words to do the heavy lifting.
6. Leda
A haunting invocation of Greek myth (Leda and the Swan) where Zauner shapes the story into quiet, eerie poetry. The lyrics dwell on power, vulnerability, and desire’s darker edge, while the arrangement floats between unsettling and beautiful. It’s one of the album’s most daring experiments — timeless yet unsettlingly modern.
7. Picture Window
Here, Zauner turns melancholy into stasis. She sings of watching the world through glass, frozen while laughter and movement happen beyond reach (“You dream enough for two, dear….Picture window. Looking out at somewhere else…Do you not conceive of my death at every minute, while your life just passes you by?”) The pedal steel sighs in sympathy, percussion ticks like a restless clock. It’s devastating in its simplicity — longing not for grandeur, but for motion itself.
8. Men in Bars (feat. Jeff Bridges)
A weary duet. Zauner’s voice intertwines with Bridges’ gravelly timbre as they describe fleeting solace found in bars and dim light. The song is raw compared to the ornate arrangements elsewhere — just piano, brushed drums, and a ghostly steel guitar. After so much elegance, this roughness feels earned, a confessional whispered across a drink. She’s been unfaithful: “Got lost on the way, I took a route. I didn’t mean to follow down. And I was tempted, sure. But I have come home now.” She ends up in bars. They sing at the end, “Who am I to leave behind? We built this, and even when it breaks apart, it’s ours.” But Bridges finishes off: “But who could say that I’m to blame for wondering? I never knew I’d wind up here to take up arms with men in bars.” (probably also unfaithful ones, like every relationship on this album). Despite the undertones, it is a short and quite touching track.
9. Winter in LA
Cinematic and ironic, this track imagines Los Angeles in its coldest, most melancholy state. Played by Zauner, castanets click against a lounge-like arrangement, while she sings of longing for happier love songs. It’s playful on the surface but aching underneath — a wink that hides a bruise (“And if I were a happier woman, with flowers in a vase. Writing the sweetest songs…They’re for the man she loves; she loves. She loves the sun and California days. Sweet and warm like winter in LA.”)
10. Magic Mountain
In the finale, Zauner sings of devotion as both elevation and entrapment: to devote yourself to something beautiful is also to be locked away with it. The cello and instrumental arrangement swells like a closing curtain, the strings rising until they dissolve. It’s a fitting end: melancholy not conquered, but exalted.
Strengths and Weaknesses
The strength of this record is its atmosphere: lush, cinematic, unified. Zauner has created a twilight world and invites listeners to dwell in it without irony. The paraphrased lyrics show her ability to move between simplicity (“life is sad, but here is someone“) and grand mythic imagery.
Its weakness is the same as its strength: sometimes the atmosphere is too heavy, the songs blurring together in their ornate sadness. A track like “Mega Circuit” feels conceptually necessary but emotionally thin. Those who fell in love with Jubilee’s hooks may find themselves adrift.
Final Verdict
For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) isn’t a record you sing along to in joy — it’s one you sink into, like a velvet curtain closing around you. It is less immediate, less hook-driven, but far more ambitious in scope. Zauner reframes melancholy not as defeat, but as a kind of artful devotion.
If Jubilee was sunlight and Soft Sounds From Another Planet was cosmic starlight, this album is moonlight: dim, haunting, romantic, and strangely consoling.
For those who carry sadness like a second skin, Zauner has composed a soundtrack — not to escape it, but to dignify it.
Chris Garrod, August 22, 2025
Top tier: Orlando in Love, Magic Mountain, Honey Water, Picture Window, Men in Bars.
Lower tier: Mega Circuit
https://michellezauner.bandcamp.com/album/for-melancholy-brunettes-sad-women