Jubilee

Traverses Eighties-indebted dance, swirling alt-pop and homespun lo-fi across a tight 10-song track list. There are reprieves – where the energy quietens to syrupy, fluid ballads on which Zauner’s voice lolls as opposed to skips – but the emotional journey is always upward.

It takes all the things that have always served Japanese Breakfast well — Zauner’s awareness of her voice and how best to deploy it, her knack for narrative and story as well as great hooks — and offers them fresh soil in which to grow.

Jubilee is an album that showcases Zauner's talents to their fullest and makes crushing on Japanese Breakfast hard to resist.

This album certainly is a rush, and it’s also the best Japanese Breakfast album to date.

Her work is built around the truths of her perspective, not just that each song and its themes resonate with her, but that every tragedy offers nuance to life. Zauner has given us her strongest album yet and so far, the best album of the year.

Zauner is absolutely in her element here and it goes without question that while this is undeniably her year, she’s also just rebranded herself as one of today’s top-tier indie visionaries.

‘Jubilee’ sees Zauner fully unshackled for the first time, keeping the emotive core of her songwriting and marrying it with boundless energy and ambition. It’s truly a triumph.

Each track is a confined attempt at gaiety, a succinct story in service of this greater mission of uninhibited emotion — which is ultimately, hopefully joy.

Jubilee’s 10 songs arrive fully baked, frosted with bigger beats and softer swirls, all stacked carefully on top of each other.

There’s a depth and sensual nuance to the album that most of her contemporaries lack.

The album isn’t uplifting in a simplistic sense. Often, it’s blotted with shadows. In her lyrics, Zauner has a fondness for zig-zagging from ebullient to devastating, often when you least expect it (“With my luck you’ll be dead within the year / I’ve come to expect it,” she croons on ‘In Hell’). And yet at a molecular level, Jubilee is a rush.

Even when things get musically darker on the shimmering alt-pop of ‘Posing In Bondage’, there remains a prioritisation of pop melody; the fat is trimmed from all 10 songs on the record, leaving perfectly formed three-and-a-half-minute pop songs that want – and deserve – to be blasting out of your radio.

Japanese Breakfast’s latest LP Jubilee is the project’s most ecstatic-sounding album to date, although one glance at the lyrics will tell you that Zauner isn’t done excavating the thornier aspects of dependency, devotion, and longing.

While the emotions Zauner is sifting through across Jubilee’s 10 tracks are at once recognizable and powerfully vulnerable, they aren’t always easy to pin down. Zauner frequently crafts metaphors and imagines situations that are at times compellingly contradictory or unclear. ... The ambiguity gives the music a tantalizing quality, insistently throwing us off her trail.

It’s a jubilant and sweet experience. The least conceptually bound Zauner has been, she moves confidently through a space befitting of the multi-hyphenate artist she has become.

Listeners love Japanese Breakfast because she gives you everything: a buffet of sub-genres, blunt confessions, larger concepts, and on-point orchestration, led by someone with undeniable charisma. Listening to Michelle Zauner go all in on Jubilee provides every bit of the joy she intended.

While much has been made of Jubilee being an album about joy—and in some ways, it is—the majority of the third Japanese Breakfast album captures a full breadth of emotions. ... It’s on the back half of this album where things don’t click as strongly.