“The song is a sci-fi narrative about a woman who falls in love with a robot. In the video she hallucinates on rocket fuel and tears apart her spaceship in an attempt to build a body for her robot lover.”
Michelle Zauner, Pitchfork
After the psychological realism of Psychopomp(2016), Japanese Breakfast (Michelle Zauner's indie rock solo project) is poised to explore more speculative sci-fi horizons with her sophomore album Soft Sounds From Another Planet (forthcoming, 4 July).
In a press release, Zauner noted that the album "alludes to the promise of something that may or may not be there, like a hope in something more. The songs are about human resilience and the strength it takes to claw out of the darkest of spaces." The grief Zauner endured after the death of her mother remains a potent influence on her work, despite the change the direction from confessional bedroom pop to a more futuristic and digital sound: "I used the theme as a means to disassociate from trauma. Space used as a place of fantasy.”
The lead single, "Machinist", thus explores the recesses of human desire, loneliness and the need for intimacy by featuring a perspective that could have belonged to Portia Charney. There's a brief human-robot dialog, where Zauner goes "Do you trust me / Can you feel it?" and the machine responds "Total control / Can't let go". The disco-tinged retro-futurist sonic template (courtesy of mechanical synths and drum machines) seems familiar and avant garde at the same time, blending the robotic and the organic with Zauner's spoken-word whispers and vocoder-processed vocals. She sings earnestly about wanting pleasure, bliss, a 'piece of your heart' and 'winning your love', leaving the song to end with an extended jax solo that hints at an anti-climactic resolution to this tale of unrequited desire.
Zauner's new aesthetic is certainly unexpected and intriguing, fuelling great expectations for the new album and the other aesthetic possibilities she might shape-shift into in the near future.
