Japanese Breakfast

Michelle Zauner doesn’t just write songs as Japanese Breakfast; she processes life in public, turning profound loss into shimmering art. The project began as an outlet while she cared for her mother, and its first two albums—2016’s Psychopomp and 2017’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet—swim in the shoegaze haze of that grief. But then came the pivot. Her third album, the Grammy-nominated Jubilee (2021), made a conscious, explosive turn toward celebration, bottling pure 80s pop ambition in cathartic anthems like "Be Sweet." It’s the sonic companion to her blockbuster memoir Crying in H Mart, a parallel body of work that cements Zauner as one of her generation’s most vital storytellers.