OPE! Mixtape #59: What if your sadness is boring

On not loving new albums by Japanese Breakfast and Lucy Dacus

Welcome to OPE!, the newsletter by writer and music journalist Brady Gerber. This is where I curate the week’s best new links and songs and muse on life. All typos are intentional.

Well, hello there. How are you?

2025: Pretty boring year for the “big” albums we’ve been expecting from within my corner of the music world.

On my radar for 2025, I was first most curious about the new albums by Japanese Breakfast and Lucy Dacus, two promo album streams that I’ve had for a while and two back-to-back stinkers from two beloved artists who helped define an era of "Big Indie” that I think we’re finally exiting.

I still like both artists overall. The former released one of my favorite albums of the 2010s, and the latter I interviewed somewhat recently. But these new albums are forgettable. Like looking at an elegant, classical-looking portrait in a well-regarded museum and feeling like something must be artistic about it since someone bothered to put it in a museum … yet you still can’t place your feelings on it and not quite sure if you like it or if you feel compelled to scratch your chin and find merit and nod your head because … it’s in a museum.

I won’t press the matter too much—I caught last week’s episode of Indiecast and pretty much agree on most counts regarding the sleepiness of the Japanese Breakfast record—but it feels like the “lol so sad” era of mainstream indie rock has run its course. (I say this as a The 1975 fan, too.) Good variations of this style will still exist. But in terms of my profession of thinking of the musical trends that tend to engage with a lot of different kinds of people, the tank feels empty. It has been for a while. Maybe it’s just hitting me because I’m getting older and finding “lol sad” not as interesting as I did in my 20s, so when albums like this don’t hit for me, they really don’t connect. But for me at least, the output finally reflects how nice it would feel to move on, or at least add something new to the mix. I’m still patiently waiting for another “Smells Like Teen Spirit” moment to wake up a sleepy music industry into shock while doubling as an excuse for musicians to rip off the good parts of disco. Sleepy, bespoke guitars and drum machines … you can take a break. You’ll be cool again in 17 months.

I understand that my “I think Tears For Fears is good not great“ bias is showing, and that’s especially getting in the way of me enjoying what Japanese Breakfast has become. This and the last album feel like bland Tears For Fears cosplay, ironic since one of my favorite things Japanese Breakfast has ever done was cover Tears For Fears. Dacus doesn’t quite have that Tears For Fears problem, for what it’s worth.

I know some readers will enjoy these two records, and they might not be critics whose job is to think about and articulate narratives such as “Big Indie” and just want something pleasant and inoffensive to play in the background while reading The Cut and copying their opinions and pretending to stand by them. Great. I also read The Cut. For everyone else who cares, I would still like to present the idea that quiet quitting is no longer an interesting concept to get excited about when it comes to promoting new music. Praising someone for making forgettable music because it somehow fits a theme of being really tried and wanting to forget being a person or one’s pain in this world is now boring to me, even if it’s still relatable and valid. I’m sick of relatability being the only reason to care about bland music. Your most personal album, you say? Snooze. This song contains clues for your fans to decipher, turning your album into a Marvel movie? Jump off a cliff. You’re dancing away the trauma of living in post-Late Capitalism America and embracing joy as an act of resistance? You doofus. We already did this. You write upbeat pop music with melancholy lyrics? You’re literally the first person to ever do that.

… With that said, I will gladly read any new books Michelle Zauner puts out. Dacus, too, for that matter. Crying in H Mart has actual good writing in it, and Dacus is more of a poet who’s better-than-solid with a guitar. I’m rooting for them. And it’s nice to be able to do more than one thing; it’s interesting to catch these artists at this moment in their careers when they might wrestle in real time with the idea of “Hey, maybe I’m more than just a musician.” Maybe that’s where my frustration with these two albums comes from, this feeling of, “Why these songs?”

I too am surprised by my grumbiness this morning. Maybe it’s just the Spring chills. Maybe it’s because both these albums will be on a lot of end-of-year lists by default. Maybe it’s because I just caught myself up on some of the other upcoming 2025 “big” releases with confirmed release dates that I’m considering writing about: Alison Krauss, Destroyer, Perfume Genius, Craig Finn, Bon Iver, Car Seat Headrest, Lana Del Rey, Matt Berninger, Miley Cyrus, Ty Segall, and Lil Wayne.

Yikes.

You could not come up with a more washed list. I’m biased of course, but I think my mixtapes each week will crush any of these albums. I hope I’m wrong on some. Thank goodness I actually like that Haim single. It gets better with each re-listen.

But enough about all that. Here are this week’s best links and songs …

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