Japanese Breakfast‘s Michelle Zauner is preparing to release her new album Jubilee, and her debut memoir Crying in H Mart, in the coming months. We’ve heard her bright lead single “Be Sweet,” and today we’re getting its follow-up “Posing in Bondage.” The track is spacious in its build—it begins somberly with echoey synths that sound like cellos waking up from a nap. She sings about the stillness and patience of waiting for someone’s embrace, hungry for tactile recognition. “When the world divides into two people / Those who have felt pain and those who have yet to,” goes one prominent lyric.
“Posing in Bondage” is another transfixing track to add to Japanese Breakfast’s stellar catalogue, and the music video Zauner directed shouldn’t be ignored. Colliding humor, horror, and melancholy, Zauner enters an eerie grocery store on a hoverboard covered in blood. She ends up bonding with the cashier played by Girlpool‘s Harmony Tividad, and the two share some noodles together. It’s lovely and strange and makes each day waiting for Jubilee worth it.
Zauner said in a statement that the track is “about loneliness and longing, a song about two people who want so badly to connect but are never quite able to do so.” When it came to the video’s location? “No place felt lonelier than an empty grocery store at 1 a.m. The video is actually an epilogue to the one that will accompany our next single, here presented out of order.”
Watch it below and pre-order Jubilee, which is officially out June 4 on Dead Oceans. Oh yes, J Brekkie has also shared a series of tour dates, which you can check out below the visual.
