On December 28, 2023, Michelle Zauner left her home in Brooklyn, New York to spend a year in Seoul. The Japanese Breakfast frontwoman was coming off a huge two-and-a-half years. Her 2021 memoir Crying in H-Mart spent 55 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list; she soundtracked the 2021 indie video game Sable; and she played 135 shows across North America, Europe, South America and Asia, on a tour for her band’s Grammy-nominated album Jubilee, from July 2021 to October 2023.
Before leaving Brooklyn, Zauner described her year in Seoul to the New Yorker as a “hiatus.” (Never mind the fact that she was there to learn the language and write about the experience for a new book.) But Zauner is officially back. She released Orlando In Love – the lead single from her fourth record, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), which will be released on Friday March 21 via Dead Oceans – last month, and today dropped the second single, Mega Circuit.
“I’m not someone that writes all the time. I’m very much like an on-and-off faucet where I intentionally turn it on and turn it off,” Zauner tells Broadsheet by phone from the United States. She finished recording the new album before she left for Seoul, but most of the visuals were done in South Korea. Zauner worked with a Korean team on all the music videos including the yet-to-be-released video for Picture Window that she says was shot in different neighbourhoods around Seoul.
“[The album] was really influenced by European romanticism,” says Zauner. “It was kind of funny to be a half-Korean woman, but instead of doing something that’s Asian-influenced, be really dipping into my white heritage.”
The album cover, which sees a melancholy Zauner presiding over a romantic European banquet, is filled with references to lyrics on the record, including a pie with a Gordian knot that references Leda and an ant that alludes to Honey Water. “I wanted a taxidermied swan, and I also wanted a quill and this specific type of hat. And they were just like, ‘All these ancient European-influenced things don’t exist here, they’re very hard to find in Korea’.”
Zauner’s reverence for food is well documented. She’s long been a fan of Korean American recipe developer Maangchi and in her memoir, she writes at length about how cooking Korean food helped her cope with grief.
When we ask for Seoul recommendations, Zauner says, “I have like an entire Powerpoint presentation,” before jumping in.
It was my favourite place to take my friends that would visit, because it’s such a Korean vibe. It’s Korean chicken barbecue that’s spicy, and they mix it with cabbage, vegetables and rice cakes, and then they dump a bunch of mozzarella cheese in the middle for you to dip your spicy hot chicken into. It’s always really busy. It’s simultaneously old-school, but very modern. It’s a good place, especially to go with a big group, because you can’t really find that in a lot of places.
Gwangjang Market is the famous one, but it’s gotten really touristy and gone a little bit downhill. So Mangwon Shijang has kind of taken its place a little bit as the new hip market. That was right by my house where I would get groceries and stuff like that. There was a homemade rice cake store where I would always buy something called garaetteok, which is kind of like tteokbokki, but they’re really long and thick and I would roast them and eat them with sesame oil and salt when I got home.
Cafe culture is a really big thing, which I thought was really kind of silly and too dainty for my taste. But I realised now, if you need to kill time, there’s nowhere to go after seven in New York, unless you go to a bar. So one thing that I really miss [from Korea] is the cafe culture. Every block has like five cafes for you to go into. They’re open really late and you can just talk and hang out with your friends. I think it’s largely because people in Korea live with their parents [longer into adulthood], and so they can’t just go to each other’s houses and hang out, they need a place to go. One of my favourite cafes was called Anthracite Coffee.
One thing I didn’t really eat much of until I lived there this year was called pyongyang mingyun, which is a specific type of really, really bland beef cold noodle soup. We have a Korean drummer that played with us for a couple of shows while we were there, and he took us to these two places that were both famous pyeongyang naengmyeon places. One is called Pildong, one is called Eulmildae. That was a dish that I discovered I liked while I was there.
Villa Mariana and Night and Day
Those were my local watering holes. They’re both cocktail bars. They both have really, really good music. Night and Day is more an open-air environment and Villa Mariana is upstairs, it’s always purple and lit dark. They have a special Japanese ice maker, and an amazing bartender – makes a great drink. All of my parties were there.
Japanese Breakfast’s fourth album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), is out Friday March 21, 2025
