THE JAPANESE HOUSE has announced details of her second studio album, IN THE END IT ALWAYS DOES, out 30 June via Dirty Hit. Featuring recent single Boyhood, much of the album lives in the contradictory: beginnings and endings; obsession and mundanity; falling in love and falling apart.
With the album announcement comes new track SAD TO BREATHE, an upbeat sounding heartbreaker co-produced by Amber Bain (The Japanese House) with The 1975’s George Daniel and Chloe Kraemer, accompanied by a beautiful live alternate version of the track directed by Sheila Johansson which sees Amber and her extended live band strip the song back to its bare bones.
“I wrote Sad To Breathe some time ago, it’s one of the oldest songs on the record,” says Amber. “It was very different back then; it’s gone from being solely electronic to what it is now, mostly live and acoustic instrumentation. It’s about that desperate feeling when someone leaves you and the disbelief that they could. It’s funny you could have those kind of insane dramatic thoughts, that feel so real at the time, but that you can, by some miracle, look back in fondness to your entire life being ruined. It all circles back around.”
Watch the video for ‘Sad to Breathe’
Pre-order / pre-save In the End It Always Does
It’s been nearly a decade since Amber Bain’s breakout in 2015 when THE JAPANESE HOUSE was a mysterious unidentified figure shrouded in mystery and reverb. These days though, Bain’s sound and style is characteristically wide open, her vulnerabilities, thoughts and innermost feelings stitched into a tapestry of gorgeous, elevated pop music.
Written during a creative burst at the end of 2021, IN THE END IT ALWAYS DOES is primarily inspired by the events preceding it – including Bain’s first time moving to Margate, being in a throuple and the slow dissolution of those relationships. “[These two people] were together for six years and I met them, and we all fell in love at the same time – and then one of them left,” Bain recalls. “It was a ridiculously exciting start to a relationship. It was this high; and then suddenly I’m in this really domestic thing, and it’s not like there was other stuff going on – it was lockdown.” The album came together just as that chapter in her life was falling apart, with each song almost acting as a snapshot in time.
Four years after her widely celebrated debut Good At Falling, this album sees Bain lean even further into the pop realm – with help from Matty Healy and George Daniel from The 1975, Katie Gavin from MUNA and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon among others. Bain credits Gavin especially with injecting her with creative energy and inspiration throughout.
The album also sees Bain work alongside producer and engineer Chloe Kraemer (Rex Orange County, Lava La Rue, Glass Animals), an experience she describes as “life changing” due to the unspoken, shared understanding between marginalized genders in a creative space.
“I’d never worked with a woman or queer person in that way before,” Bain says. “It’s nice to have someone who completely understands your standpoint and shared experience. Also, I say ‘she’ in every song … so it’s important that someone understands that.”
IN THE END IT ALWAYS DOES TRACK LISTING:
- Touching Yourself
- Sad to Breathe
- Over There
- Morning Pages
- Boyhood
- Indexical reminder of a morning well spent
- Friends
- Sunshine Baby
- Baby goes Again
- You always get what you want
- One for sorrow, two for Joni Jones
THE JAPANESE HOUSE is the acclaimed project of Amber Bain, who has released music under the pseudonym since 2015 and shared her debut album, Good At Falling, in 2019. Since her emergence in 2015, she has received industry-wide acclaim from The Guardian (“feels like a refreshing splash of cold water on tear-stained cheeks”) Sunday Times Culture (“stunning”) Pitchfork, i-D, VICE, NME, GQ, Interview Magazine, BBC Radio One and many more.
