Michelle Zauner’s anticipated third album as Japanese Breakfast, Jubliee, is coming out on June 4 via Dead Oceans. The last glimpse of the album we had was the video for “Posing in Bondade,” with Zauner entering an empty grocery store on a hoverboard, covered in blood, where she made an intimate connection with the clerk played by Girlpool’s Harmony Tividad. We never got the answers for her stone cold presence entering that eerie market, or why her chin was stained red, or why that connection with noodles and Tividad was so needed. But now, we do.
The latest single from JB is titled “Savage Good Boy” and comes with an opulent video starring The Sopranos‘ Michael Imperioli. “I want to take care of you,” Zauner sings on the upbeat track. “I wanna make the money till there’s no more to be made.” She sings about wealth and security while draped in luxurious clothing. In one scene, Imperioli and her are playing cards—he wins, and starts rubbing it in her face. The pair feel like a symbol of power; is their relationship built off love? Or, is it the ability to hold power over another when the world is crumbling? “When the city’s under water / I will wine and dine you in the hollows,” she sings later on.
Zauner shared the song’s inspiration in a statement: “‘Savage Good Boy’ came from a headline I read about billionaires buying bunkers. I was interested in examining that specific type of villainy, and I found myself adopting the perspective of a rich man coaxing a young woman to come live with him underground, attempting to rationalize his almost impossible share of greed and miserliness.”
She continued about the video she directed, “I knew I wanted the music video to be a pretty literal interpretation of that idea. I wanted to juxtapose images of this post-apocalyptic, industrial bunker with the lightness and extravagance of rococo fashion and set design. Aiming for that balance, my cinematographer, Adam Kolodny, and I were really inspired by Chan Wook Park’s The Handmaiden, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, and Sally Potter’s Orlando.”
Check out the video and it’s unexpected ending below.
