Japanese Breakfast considers the incel with dreamy, suffocating pop
Who is writing songs for incels? It's a thought that struck me as I watched the devastating TV drama Adolescence, thinking about that vast but largely invisible body of lonely young men buying into the conspiratorial misogyny of online hate. Then a song snagged my consciousness by American-Korean singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, who operates as sometime band Japanese Breakfast.
Mega Circuit is a shiny California pop rock ballad of youthful ennui and desire. It is sung from the perspective of a young woman watching boys showing off in a car park, shimmering with careless bravado that crumbles up close. 'I'm gonna write my baby a shuffle so good,' Zauner blankly sings, 'or he's gonna make me suffer the way I should.' The singer performs oral sex on her boyfriend and sighs sadly with empathy for 'the soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded.'
It is a thorny character study, wrapped in gauzy, melodic dream pop. It seems a very bold choice for a single in an escapist pop environment that tends to avoid the political tensions of our troubled age.
The 35-year-old Zauner authored a best-selling 2021 memoir, Crying in H Mart, about the death of her mother. For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is her fourth album. She was Grammy nominated for 2022's Jubilee, a more sonically charged collection, although still underpinned by sadness.
Virtuoso Americana guitarist and sometime Bob Dylan collaborator Blake Mills produces, taking Zauner out of her synthy, alt-rock territory into something more California acoustic. It is weirdly damped down, like an impoverished indie cousin of Taylor Swift's Folklore, as if they have taken all the elements of classic Laurel Canyon songcraft and shoved them into a small box with no air. It made me think of Los Angeles after the fire, nursing wounds but carrying on as if nothing has happened. Zauner sings softly and almost inexpressively, and you really have to lean in to pick up the words. It's worth it because her lyrics put her in the top tier of contemporary songwriters.
Little Girl is sung from the point of view of a feckless father, drinking in a hotel with a young sex worker, thinking about the daughter who won't speak to him. It takes place adjacent to the same car park where Mega Circuit unfolds, the characters in both songs isolated by failures of perspective. 'Little girl, meant no harm,' sings Zauner's sad old man.
Zauner operates in a hinterland familiar to fans of such 1970s greats as Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits and Randy Newman, yet almost entirely absent in the work of her poppier contemporaries. Movie star Jeff Bridges makes a curious guest appearance, duetting on Men In Bars. Practically the personification of laidback LA manhood, there is a compelling mismatch of voices, Bridges's singing high and strained next to Zauner's soft breathiness as they pick over different versions of a breakup story. 'We built this / And even when it breaks apart / It's ours,' they sing. For Melancholy Brunettes is an odd, subtle, suffocating album essaying a complexity and ambiguity you don't often hear in modern pop. Neil McCormick
Also out:
Greentea Peng, Tell Dem It's Sunny ★★★★☆
South London's Greentea Peng has the potential to be a huge crossover star. Born Aria Wells to Afro-Arabic parents and now aged around 30 (she hasn't cared to reveal her precise date of birth), she makes a pungent, psychedelic form of RnB infused with strong flavours of reggae and trip-hop, backed by a fully instrumented rhythm combo.
Multi-pierced and tattooed, a little bit bonkers (think: the UK's answer to Erykah Badu), she's the kind of effortlessly charismatic, zero-damns-given performer who'll slouch onstage late-afternoon at a festival and win everybody's hearts, and whose 'real music' connects with those listeners (okay, then: older folks) who are bewildered by Gen-Z pop's pre-programmed tinniness.
On the heels of 2021's debut, Man Made, plus 20-odd singles, EPs and mixtapes, Tell Dem It's Sunny feels like Wells's point of top-flight arrival, crystallising her ideas of spiritual growth and slow-mo beats-driven mysticism into irresistibly relatable songs of transcendence and self-questioning. 'Is it too late for me?' she wonders on third track, One Foot, to an arpeggiating guitar riff reminiscent of Paul Weller's The Changingman. On paean to skin-shedding Green, a descending bassline aptly recalls Tricky's Hell Is Round The Corner.
You sense that this young woman, who most refreshingly chooses not to share her every life drama on social media, has considerable demons to purge, but by the key track in the album's latter stages, I AM (Reborn), she has conquered them and she's re-entering the bear pit of contemporary youth culture with her guard up: 'I am not who I was yesterday,' she defiantly reasons, 'so how can you know me?' On the strength of Tell Dem It's Sunny's liltingly exploratory grooves, a world-wide audience will surely start getting acquainted with this maverick icon-in-waiting. Andrew Perry
Best New Songs
By Poppie Platt
The Horrors, The Silence That Remains
The standout track for me from the Essex psych-rocker's excellent new album Night Life, which is out today. Characteristically dark, Gothic and brimming with influences from the worlds of shoegaze, psych and Krautrock, it's a solid return to form, elevated both by Faris Badwan's snarling vocals and a menacing bass.
Role Model, Sally, When the Wine Runs Out
The US indie-pop singer has become TikTok's go-to artist for catchy earworm hooks, and this latest offering continues his knack for penning a killer bridge, as he sings of a lover destined to break his heart: 'Aw, s–t, here we go again / I'm falling headfirst'. We've all been there.
Yungblud, Hello Heaven, Hello
Don McClean, who? If you thought American Pie was long, listen to Doncaster punk-rocker Yungblud's new track, which clocks in at over nine minutes. It's a shape-shifting, ferocious anthem about getting through the other side of a dark spell, as the 27-year-old vulnerably reflects 'There's a chance I won't see you tomorrow / So I will spend today saying hello'.
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Daily Mirror
42 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
'If only Macca and Mick Jagger took on the Establishment like Bruce Springsteen'
I went to watch Bruce Springsteen this week and was blown away. Not just by the talent and energy the 75-year-old poured into a three-and-a-half hour set at Anfield. But his unflinching humanity, uncompromising principles, undying passion for the underdog, and unquenchable optimism in his fellow humans. All articulated in his utter despising of Donald Trump. 'The America I love and have sung to you about for so long, a beacon of hope for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight we ask all of you who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices, stand with us against authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.' That was how he opened the show, and throughout it, to much cheering and applause, he peppered his rousing back catalogue with fierce attacks on 'an unfit President ' and a 'demagogue'. It felt more like a political rally than a pop concert, and, magnificently, it has truly riled the demagogue. After similar rhetoric in Manchester last month, the Great Man-Child called Springsteen 'a pushy, obnoxious JERK' and accused him of treachery, wailing 'this dried-out prune of a rocker ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the country'. Thankfully he won't. And it's a joy to behold. Rather than phoning in his greatest hits and soaking in adulation as his bank account swells, he is channelling raw anger and urging his audience to join in his joyous rage. I only wish some of Britain's musical legends like Sir Mick, Sir Rod, Sir Elton and Sir Macca were equally as bold and used their platform to challenge Establishment injustices, instead of bathing in the reflected glory of knighthoods and not rocking the boat. Springsteen's stance takes real courage, exemplified in the kickback he is facing from sections of his blue-collar fanbase. Last week, in his home state of New Jersey, a Springsteen tribute band called No Surrender was dropped by a venue for fear of a MAGA backlash. His critics say it's cheap posturing. That he's a bad loser who, like the man he attacks, refuses to accept the will of the American people. That he should take a look at all the luvvies who came out for Kamala Harris last year and realise that celebrity endorsements are now dead. But they are wrong. Anyone who hears Bruce express his pain over what is happening to his beloved country knows it's genuine. Besides, he's been sticking up for the underdog all of his career. During the 1985 miners' strike he anonymously handed over a cheque for $20,000 to a support group. As for those questioning his loyalty to America, what can be more patriotic than calling out the fake patriotism of a phoney President who has never cared about anyone but himself? A chancer whose real aim as CEO of the US is to spread his brand to every corner of the world and redistribute wealth further towards his billionaire backers at the expense of the poor. Trump and his people, The Boss told us on Wednesday, 'have no concern or idea what it means to be deeply American. Despite its faults it is a great country. And we will survive this moment'. With true patriots like Springsteen around, America has a chance. Butlin's is offering up to 40% off family breaks in 2025 and 2026.
The Herald Scotland
an hour ago
- The Herald Scotland
'Thrilling and exhilarating': Scottish debut album from 1990 sparkles
It disclosed that a new remaster of The Same Sky, the much-lauded 1990 debut album by the band to which she gave her name, was in the hands of Seabass Vinyl, a vinyl pressing plant in East Lothian. Horse hopes to have copies by June 21, ahead of the launch that night of The Same Sky 35 tour, which kicks off at Paisley Arts Centre. The Same Sky, which was released on EMI/Capitol in June 1990, just as Glasgow's reign as City of Culture was coming to an end, is widely seen as one of the most assured, and soulful, Scottish debuts of recent decades. With lyrics written by the guitarist Angela McAlinden and sung by the powerfully expressive vocalist that is Horse, it reached number 44 in the UK charts. One un-named American journalist is said to have described it as 'the best debut album for years'. Horse, as a solo artist, has since gone on to release, on her own Randan label, several solo albums, the most recent of which is The Road Less Travelled. She was first to bring an orchestra to the Barrowland venue in 1995 – the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – and has collaborated with Lynn Ferguson to turn her true-life stories into Careful, a well-received, one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe, which was named after one of the stand-out tracks on The Same Sky. In 2016, interviewed by the Australian magazine, LOTL, Horse was asked for the secret of her longevity. Her answer was revealing. 'Making The Same Sky was thrilling and exhilarating — a real life-changer', she said. 'I've never, ever lost that sense when making music. It brings me great joy. I understand, with hindsight, that from teenage years to now, my music has developed from within me by way of osmosis and absolute heart, not head. It has quite literally saved me. It has been my solace and comfort, a companion and a great healer. 'My idea of success and longevity has completely and utterly changed over the years that I have been making music', she added. 'Because I put so much of myself into my music, it's obvious why I would take it personally when commercial 'success', or rather, the widely held view of what success is, may have eluded me. However, I reached a place personally and professionally, long ago of being happy with my success. The great sense of achievement and pleasure from still making music and having a true and positive impact on people is incredible. I feel very lucky'. Horse was born in Newport on Tay, in Fife, and grew up in Lanark. She once explained to the Los Angeles Times, 'I hated my birth name, don't ask me what it is. I grew up thinking it was a punishment, so when I was about 14, I changed it to Horse. Almost overnight I became a new person'. In interviews she spoke of having a terrible time growing up, being attacked and bullied because she was gay in a small town, and, eventually, forcing her to leave. Music, and writing her own stories, proved to be her salvation. 'Writing songs in my little back bedroom was a way to close the door on all of that and escape to another world,' Horse told Billy Sloan a few years ago. 'It became a means of taking care of myself and also releasing lots of unhappiness, anger and tension. What began to happen was a kind of osmosis, almost. My emotions became the root of the songs, which makes them all quite heartfelt.' In the Eighties, she met Angela McAlinden, and they began working on songs together, and over the years other musicians joined them. Horse, who wrote the melodies, and Angela, who composed the lyrics, made a formidable team. A tape made by the band came to the attention of the producers on The Tube, a wildly popular TV music show at the time. 'We were really just thrown on', Horse told The National, the Herald's sister paper, in 2022. The band guested on the show in March 1987. 'The soundcheck was the camera check – and there were cameras everywhere! My mouth was so dry and I could hardly sing. However, in those days there was no social media or way of contacting the show other than phoning in and they told us that the switchboard had been jammed with people asking about 'that' band. "At that point we had no management, and we really weren't equipped to 'go'. It was such a lost opportunity but what a great experience for us. A mass audience of over five million meant when we were back in Scotland people did start to look and point at me in the street. Not for bad reasons either'. Read more After more demo tapes being sent to publishers and labels a publishing deal was finally secured with the giant EMI. Sally Perryman organised a showcase in Glasgow for the top record labels at what was then the Third Eye Centre (now the CCA), and from this they signed to Capitol. The two women began crafting the 10 songs that would appear on the album. The production was in the hands of Pete Smith, for whom the band first showcased the album's songs in a gig at Paisley Arts Centre – the very place where the Same Sky 35 tour begins in a fortnight's time. The recording of the album was, however, interrupted by an unforeseeable development; realising that something was amiss with her voice, Horse consulted a doctor, then a specialist, who told that she had a node on her left vocal cord. The singer wanted to delay an operation until after the album was finished, but the specialist recommended otherwise. The operation took place, and she had to remain silent for 10 days. The recording of her vocals was put back for two months; in the meantime, the band continued to put down the tracks. The 10 songs on The Same Sky have so many highlights, as signalled by the opening, soaring one-two of …And She Smiled, and The Speed of the Beat of My Heart. Careful, the poignant closing track, was recorded with a 12-piece string section and arranged by Audrey Riley. It was the ultimate single from the album, it would later be covered, solo and with an acoustic guitar, by Will Young. Horse is in superb voice throughout, and the emotional impact of Angela's lyrics can't be overstated. One track, Sweet Thing, expresses a sense of longing, and also gives rise to the album title: 'Can our hearts synchronise, my baby? / Miles of distance come between us like years/ Covered by the same sky but so separately…' It also happens to be Pete Smith's favourite track on the record. He's especially proud of the build-up into the chorus, as he told Davie Scott on the latter's BBC Radio Scotland Classic Scottish Albums series in 2022. 'Sometimes you get something eighty per cent right, sometimes you get things fifty per cent right. I got that a hundred per cent right'. Horse, in subsequent interviews, spoke of her lasting pride in the record, noting with pride that a lot of people had said it remained their favourite albums of the Nineties. But there is perhaps a sense that greater success might have been yielded by The Same Sky. There were several time-consuming issues with the record label, Capitol UK, and frustrations with the way that Horse herself was marketed. 'We were never part of any clique', she reflected as she discussed the album with Davie Scott. 'We were never part of the Glasgow crowd, like Postcard [Records], but we were around at the same time as Hue and Cry, Deacon Blue, [the Pearlfishers], H20 – a really successful seam of Scottish artists – but we always just never seemed to pass Go and collect £200. 'For me, with hindsight, some of it was to do with two women being at the front of the band – particularly myself, being gay, being lesbian, and very obviously lesbian, because I was very androgynous … so I think we didn't tick the boxes that lots of other people ticked, and something that could have been incredibly powerful in terms of media, or just a real marketable brand thing, was Marmite. Ultimately, I just wanted our music to be heard". Read more On the Record It took another three years before the follow-up album, the equally fine God's Home Movie was released on MCA/Universal, in November 1993, and peaked at 42 in the British charts. Speaking to the Evening Times in August 1993, Horse said: 'We've always been very optimistic about our music and knew that sooner or later we'd be able to put problems into the past. Playing live during the last couple of years has been great for us. Despite the fact that we couldn't solve the record-company hassles, we knew there were a lot of fans out there who hadn't forgotten about us. They really kept us going and made us doubly determined to succeed.'' The Herald's David Belcher predicted at the time: 'It would seem that Horse McDonald, the woman, and Horse, the band, are on the verge of becoming Horse, the big-time pop phenomenon'. It didn't quite work out like that, unfortunately, and the band eventually broke up. But Horse has continued to successfully release her own music since 1999. The most recent album was The Road Less Travelled in 2024. The Same Sky 35 anniversary tour, and the 2025 remaster, will add lustre to the reputation of an excellent debut album. * For full dates of the Same Sky 35 tour, see
New Statesman
4 hours ago
- New Statesman
Bruce Springsteen faces the end of America
Photo montage by Gaetan Mariage / Alamy When I met Patti Smith soon after Donald Trump's first victory, she said she'd ended up next to him at various New York dinners over the years, back in the Seventies, when he was pitching Trump Towers. 'We were born in the same year, and I have to look at this person and think: all our hopes and dreams from childhood, going through the Sixties, everything we went through – and that's what came out of our generation. Him.' Smith's sing-song voice was in my head at Anfield Stadium in Liverpool on one of the final nights of Bruce Springsteen's Land of Hope and Dreams tour. Springsteen was born three years after Trump and will also have sat at many New York dinners with him. Those with half an eye on the news would be forgiven for thinking that Bruce has been lobbing disses at the president from the stage between his hits, but his latest show is heavier than that: a conscious recasting of two decades of his more politicised music, with a four-minute incitement to revolution in the middle. Here is a bit of what he says: 'The America I love and have sung to you about for so long, a beacon of hope for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight we ask all of you who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices, stand with us against authoritarianism and let freedom ring. In America right now we have to organise at home, at work, peacefully in the street. We thank the British people for their support…' Clearly few in the US are speaking out like this on stage, and Trump has responded by calling Springsteen a 'dried-out prune of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!)' and threatening some kind of mysterious action upon his return. Springsteen, the heartland rocker, was never exactly part of the counter-culture, though he did avoid Vietnam by doing the 'basic Sixties rag', as he put it, and acting crazy in his army induction. Yet he has become a true protest singer in his final act. He wears tweed and a tie these days, partly because he's 75 and partly, you suspect, to convey a moral seriousness. When I last saw him, two years ago, I thought I saw some of Joe Biden's easy energy. Well, Bruce still has his faculties. The feeling is: listen to the old man, he has something to say. Springsteen's late years have been something to behold. At some point in the last decade he stopped dyeing his hair and started to talk in a stylised, reedy, story-book voice. The image of the America he seemed to represent shifted back from Seventies Pittsburgh to Thirties California: the bare-armed steelworker became the Marlboro Man, and in 2019 there was a Cowboy album, Western Skies, with an accompanying film in which he was seen on horseback. His autobiography Born to Run revealed recent battles with depression. And it is depression you see tonight in Liverpool – in the wince, the twisted mouth, the accusing index finger; in his entreaty to Liverpool's fans to 'indulge' his sermon against the American administration, delivered night after night, to scatterings of applause. It is a depression I recognise in older American friends who fear they're going to the grave with everything they knew and loved about their country disappearing. But depression is also the stuff of life, of energy. Springsteen has been particularly angry since the early Noughties, since the second Bush administration, but this is his moment somehow, and his song of greedy bankers – 'Death to My Hometown' – is spat out with new meaning in 2025, an ominous abstraction. The father-to-son speech in 'Long Walk Home' feels different in this politically charged world: 'Your flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone/Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't'). A furious version of 'Rainmaker' ('Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, they'll hire a rainmaker') is dedicated to 'our dear leader'. As much as I admire Springsteen and seem to have followed him around and written about him for years, the Land of Hope and Dreams tour made me realise I hadn't fully known what he was for. When I saw him in Hyde Park in 2023, the first 200 yards of the crowd were given over to media wankers like me, with the paying fans at the back: every single person I had ever met in London was there, mildly pissed up and whirling about with looks of mutual congratulation. Springsteen had become, to the middle classes and above, a global symbol of right-thinking, summed up by his long stint on Broadway at $800 a ticket. His dull podcast with Barack Obama was the American version of The Rest Is Politics with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell: men saying stuff you want them to say, to confirm what you already think about stuff (Obama was in awe of Bruce). Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Politics was easy for Springsteen when politics consisted of external events happening to innocent people, rather than something taking place on the level of psychology, in a movement of masses towards a demagogue. The job he adopted, back in the Seventies, was to set a particular kind of American life in its political and historical context: to tell people who they were, and why they mattered. His appeal as a rock star always lay less in his words than in how sincerely he embodied them: his extraordinary outward energy, his mirroring of his audience, his apparent concern with others over himself. After 9/11, someone apparently rolled down a window and told him, 'We need you now,' so he wrote his song 'The Rising' from the viewpoint of a doomed New York fireman ascending the tower. A recent BBC documentary revealed he'd donated £20,000 to the Northumberland and Durham Miners Support Group during the strikes of 1984 – rather as he donated ten grand to unemployed steelworkers in Pittsburgh the previous year. His self-made success and songs about freedom were the Republican dream, but when Reagan tapped him up for endorsements it was a right of passage for Springsteen as a Democrat rocker to rebuff them (I'm pretty sure they tried to play 'Born in the USA' at Trump rallies too). He is quoted as saying that the working-class American was facing a spiritual crisis, years ago: 'It's like he has nothing left to tie him into society any more. He's isolated from the government. Isolated from his job. Isolated from his family… to the point where nothing makes sense.' Now, Trump has taken Springsteen's people (the Republicans were doing so long before Trump), and the interior life of the working man that Springsteen made it his job to portray has been exploited by someone else. 'For 50 years, I've been an ambassador for this country and let me tell you that the America I was singing about is real,' he says, possessively, on stage. Springsteen, like Jon Bon Jovi, sees his fans as workers. The distances travelled, the money spent, the babysitters paid for: that's what the three-hour gigs are all about. It is part of the psyche of a certain generation of working-class American musician to consider themselves in a contract with the people who buy their records. It is not a particularly British thing – though time and again I am impressed by the commitment required to see these big shows, especially when so many punters are of an age where they would not longer, say, sleep in a tent: £250 a night for a hotel, no taxis to the stadium, a huge Ticketmaster crash that leaves hundreds of fans outside the venue fiddling with their QR codes while Bruce can be heard inside singing the opening lines of 'My Love Will Not Let You Down'. Yet the relationship between a rock star and his fan is not a co-dependency: the fan is having a night out, but the rock star needs the fan to survive. It is hard to underestimate the psychological shift Springsteen might be undergoing, in seeing the working men and women of America moving to a politics that is repellent to him. He has not played on American soil since Trump's re-election and it is likely that this kind of political commentary there will turn the 'Bruuuuuce' into the boo. A Springsteen tribute act in his native New Jersey was recently cancelled (the band offered to play other songs, and the venue said no). Last week, a young American band told me they won't speak out about the administration on stage because they're not all white and they're afraid of getting deported. It is the job of the powerful to do the protesting, and, like Pope Leo, Springsteen's previous good works will mean nothing if he doesn't call out the big nude emperor now. The Maga crowd will still come to see him, of course, and yell the 'woah' in 'Born to Run' just as loud as everyone else does – perhaps because music is bigger than politics, or perhaps because politics is now bigger than Bruce. Though his political speeches in Liverpool (it's UK 'heartland' only this tour: no London gigs) feel slightly out of step with a city that has its own problems, it seems fair enough for Springsteen to be telling the truth about America to a crowd who's enjoyed their romantic visions of the country via his music for 50 years. But their own personal communion is suspended tonight, and the song 'My City of Ruins' has nothing to do with 9/11 any more: 'Come on… rise up…' In the crowd, a very old man is sitting on someone's shoulders. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play Anfield stadium, Liverpool, on 7 June 2025 [See also: Wes Anderson's sense of an ending] Related
