There’s a moment near the end of “Posing for Cars” where Michelle Zauner’s voice cracks open just slightly — not in grief, the way her earlier records asked her to, but in something closer to wonder — and you realize this album is doing something genuinely different from what came before it.
Jubilee arrived in June 2021, and the critical reception treated it like a coronation, which felt both right and slightly beside the point. Zauner had spent two records, Psychopomp and Soft Sounds From Another Planet, building a reputation as someone who made luminous, lo-fi guitar pop about loss. Her mother had died. She’d written about it with devastating clarity in The New Yorker and then in her memoir Crying in H Mart. Everyone knew the story. The question Jubilee answered, quietly but firmly, was: what happens when the grieving person decides they’re allowed to want things again?
The Architecture of Joy
The album was recorded primarily at Electrical Audio in Chicago — Steve Albini’s room, though Albini didn’t engineer the sessions. That distinction matters less than the room itself, which has a particular physical density to it, a sense that the air is doing some of the work. Zauner worked with producer BJ Burton, who had previously shaped records for Bon Iver, Low, and James Blake, and his fingerprints are everywhere: the way the synths on “Be Sweet” feel simultaneously vintage and slightly alien, the orchestral swell on “Kokomo, IN” that doesn’t announce itself so much as arrive.
Zauner played most of the guitars herself. Craig Hendrix came in on additional guitars. Percussion duties were split, but it’s the programming layered underneath the live drums that gives the record its peculiar weight — organic on the surface, architectural underneath.
“Posing for Cars” opens the album on a slow, patient burn, all suspended chords and careful restraint. Then “Paprika” breaks wide open, strings cascading in, and you understand immediately that Zauner has decided not to be careful this time. The strings were arranged by Maxim Moston, who brought a kind of theatrical grandeur to the sessions that could have tipped into excess but doesn’t, mostly because Zauner’s melodies are too grounded to float away.
The Difficult Middle
“Tactics” is the song I keep coming back to. It’s not the showpiece. It sits in the middle of the record, a little sparse, with Zauner’s voice doing most of the heavy lifting over a simple guitar figure. It’s the song that sounds most like someone writing honestly rather than ambitiously, and that honesty is what makes everything around it land.
“Savage Good Boy” is genuinely funny, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. A song about billionaire bunker fantasies delivered with absolute pop sincerity, built on a groove that has no business being as good as it is. It arrives at track nine like a reminder that joy doesn’t have to be solemn.
BJ Burton mixed alongside Zauner in a way that felt genuinely collaborative rather than corrective — his touch is in the negative space, in what’s allowed to breathe. The master was handled by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound in New York, and the album sounds remarkable on a properly set up system: wide, detailed, never harsh.
This is an album that rewards the good speakers and the late hour. Put it on after the house is quiet. Let “Paprika” do its thing at real volume at least once. You’ll understand why, when Zauner performed it at the 2022 Grammys, people who had never heard of Japanese Breakfast suddenly felt like they’d missed something.
They had.