The music on Japanese Breakfast’s third album, Jubilee, practically glows out of the speakers. Luminous synths sway behind buoyant orchestral arrangements as Michelle Zauner lets her voice drip in joyous, dreamy echoes. It’s a triumphant statement after two critically acclaimed albums and one New York Times best-selling memoir all marked by the grief of losing her mother to cancer.

Jubilee continues Japanese Breakfast’s progression from a more conventional and raw indie rock sound into a world of elaborate productions, bold arrangements, and expansive, artistic ideas. Describing the album to Apple Music, Zauner noted the third albums by Kate Bush and Björk as inspirations to pursue a bigger, more ambitious sound at this point in her career. But a more recent connection can be made to musicians in the indie rock realm that have pivoted to similarly grand and cinematic scales after more straightforward, and often lo-fi, beginnings.

Angel Olsen’s 2019 album All Mirrors stands as the clearest contemporary. On it Olsen, whose first recordings featured her playing unaccompanied into a laptop mic, reimagines moody, Scott Walker-style ballads into theatrical, multi-movement pieces awash in gothic and ‘80s-inspired synths. While bands pursuing a larger—and often more orchestral—sound isn’t anything new, both of these artists made a distinctive progression from more homemade beginnings before opting for such a grand statement.

The opting is key—often, genre-expanding releases come at a major commercial peak or at the behest of labels with deep pockets. Perhaps more commonly artists choose to collaborate with a classical music group (think Elvis and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Metallica with the San Francisco Symphony) that backs their standard fare rather than independently creating their own upscaled arrangements. Japanese Breakfast and Angel Olsen made their albums, like Kate Bush and Björk before them, with their own artistic control and values at the forefront. They serve as prime examples of a growing boldness by artists in the indie sphere to venture into new realms and center their songwriting rather than their sound.

The clearest 21^st century root might be Bon Iver. Justin Vernon debuted that solo project in 2007 with the critically adored For Emma, Forever Ago, a barren acoustic affair. Vernon famously wrote and recorded much of the album—at least, by some accounts—in a cabin in the woods after a break up. The 2011 follow up abandoned tender minimalism for something entirely different: layers of horns, strings, synthesizers, and auxiliary percussion. The live show frequently featured nine musicians on stage together.

That self-titled effort captured the signature emotional release of Vernon’s songwriting in a new and intentional palette. The yearning sensation produced on For Emma was augmented by gigantic, swelling chords. When your heart beat once fluttered with Vernon’s baritone-to-falsetto vocal range, it now dropped beats into an abyss of effervescent synths and a distant drummer (or two). Bon Iver presented another dramatically different image on the futuristic 2016 album 22, A Million—a glitchy and electronic art pop experiment.

Japanese Breakfast has little immediately in common with Bon Iver—though they both share a penchant for emotional epics and artistic invention. The two artists have routed their careers by a commitment to artistic merit and creative expression. After achieving critical success, though by no means the massive pop success and budget of say The Beatles before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or The Beach Boys before Pet Sounds, Zauner and Vernon recognized their abilities as songwriters and musical imagineers as more central to their artistic identities than any one sound.

Japanese Breakfast’s first album, Psychopomp, gained unexpected acclaim after Zauner gathered together some friends to record the cathartic songs she’d written while caring for her ailing mother. Those songs, while existing in the same world as Zauner’s following work, approach with a noticeably different aesthetic. They stick to a guitar-driven indie rock sound with synthesizers and the occasional touch of strings or clarinet serving mostly to evoke a more dreamlike state.

One could easily trace a trajectory across Japanese Breakfast’s albums from her debut’s “In Heaven” to Jubilee’s companion piece “In Hell,” from the ‘80s tinged groove sneaking into Psychopomp’s “The Woman That Loves You” to the follow up’s dance music-inspired “Machinist” and the pulse of her third album’s “Slide Tackle,” or from the early pop excellence of Psychopomp’s “Everybody Wants to Love You” to the unrepentantly soaring “Be Sweet” off her newest album.

Jubilee steps beyond the refining of sophomore album Soft Sounds from Another Planet, though. What Japanese Breakfast has done with this release is create a new musical landscape with its own rules, definitions, and expectations. This shows most clearly in the role of the guitar, which has moved from a foundational element to one of many supporting characters. “Paprika” introduces the album’s literally jubilant sound with a carnivalesque bounce where horns take on the most prominent non-vocal melody. The ballad “Tactics” conjures an image of Zauner leading an orchestra from the stage of a velvet-curtained theater not standing inside the beer ad-covered walls of a rock venue. Closing track “Posing for Cars” makes room for a sumptuous fuzz guitar solo but even there the guitar sounds more like a dear friend come to visit than an established part of the scenery.

Japanese Breakfast and Angel Olsen are the two most explicit examples of indie musicians mining their creative talents into new soundscapes but they’re far from the only ones to dabble with the idea. Car Seat Headrest turned Will Toledo’s indie rock riots of melancholy into similarly two-sided industrial pop tunes for 2020’s Making a Door Less Open. Waxahatchee converted her singer-songwriter-by-way-of-basement-punk-show aesthetic into an almost alt-country masterpiece on her own 2020 album, Saint Cloud, though with notably less instrumental variation from her previous releases.

One could even argue that in the world of mega-pop stars Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey have, in their own ways, demonstrated this artistic interest. Swift most recently on her twin pandemic albums folklore and evermore that teamed with the Dessner brothers (and Bon Iver, among others) to create, get this, indie-folk-inspired pop songs backed by gorgeous string arrangements. Lana Del Rey proved even more adventurous on 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! where she showed us ‘70s folk rock under the influence of some 21^st century drug. It’s worth noting that Folklore and Norman Fucking Rockwell! both featured producer Jack Antonoff. Both artists are also mega-pop stars and have all the budget and built-in fanbases of mega-pop stars.

For the most part, however, these new musical adventures center around indie artists like Japanese Breakfast. Artists who have established the trust of sizable enough indie labels in an era where some labels can rightfully be described as ‘major indies.’ Jubilee was released by Dead Oceans while Jagjaguwar backed both Bon Iver’s Bon Iver and Angel Olsen’s All Mirrors—both of those labels, coincidentally, exist within the Secretly Group family of record labels.

Jubilee is proof that it no longer requires that mega stardom of The Beatles or Taylor Swift to pursue one’s grand artistic visions. It requires an artist to have the confidence and boldness of vision to view themselves as more than one sound, as more than the loss of a loved one or the pain of a breakup that fans first knew them to be. It requires an artist to embrace their ideas and, if they’re lucky, bask in the jubilee.

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By Cameron Carr