Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner can make a word last a lifetime, or at least several seconds. She sings in a breathy register, as if caught in a reverie, painstakingly extending notes or running two or more lines together in a burst of feeling. On her third album, Jubilee, Zauner sounds somewhat more hopeful and upbeat than on 2016’s Psychopomp, which found the singer remembering her then-recently deceased mother, or 2017’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet, where she recounted the final moments of a relationship.
Jubilee’s “Paprika” and “In Hell” exude a plucky energy, boosted by a Beirut-esque horn-and-drum arrangement, while “Be Sweet” dabbles in clean-cut new wave and funk, replete with sublimely distortion-less guitar. Tracks like “Sit” prove that Zauner can still do sadcore and shoegaze well, but she also whips up twirling, psychedelic keys and an orchestral arrangement worthy of Brian Wilson on “Kokomo, IN.” The drastic shift of the latter song’s vintage sound into the clipped drum machine of the next track, “Slide Tackle,” is a credit to the album’s versatility, for the way it pulls from myriad eras and styles without ever feeling jarring.
Despite its spiritedness, though, Jubilee isn’t the victory lap that its sonic eclecticism and title suggest. On “Paprika,” Zauner addresses how indie success has left her feeling half-empty: “How’s it feel to be at the height of your powers?…I opened the floodgates and found no water, no current, no river, no rush.” Her lyrics are invitingly human for their willingness to describe unsatisfied desire. “I’m just a woman with loneliness/I’m just a woman with needs,” she sings on “Posing for Cars,” and it comes off as genuinely broken as it does proud.
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. On “Paprika,” for instance, after declaring that she finds “no rush,” she proclaims, “It’s a rush!” Is she being sarcastic, or just making space for multiple truths? The ambiguity gives the music a tantalizing quality, insistently throwing us off her trail.
The juggling of conflicting perspectives is also on fine display across Zauner’s depictions of love, as she insightfully explores the dangers of buying into agreed-upon fantasies with a romantic partner. The singer bemoans striking poses for her objects of affection on “Posing for Cars” and “Posing in Bondage,” the latter of which is Jubilee’s centerpiece, not just because it comes at the halfway point, but also because its walloping, unanswered pleas for “closeness” and “proximity” are as massive as the track’s percussion. And on “Tactics,” Zauner tells an ex-lover to go ahead and “Dose up on fiction/Disfigure the truth” while she copes with the hard stuff alone. For this singular artist, music is the chance to conceive of the exuberant possibilities of life and love while teasing out their more bracing realities.
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