Paprika

Paprika opens Jubilee with a marching band, which is the entire thesis of Michelle Zauner's third record announced in eight seconds. After two albums metabolizing her mother's death, she gave herself permission to make something orchestral and immoderate: brass fanfare, timpani, glockenspiel, a horn arrangement that swells rather than accompanies. Zauner sings about the vertigo of being an artist who has finally been heard — "how's it feel to be at the center of magic, to linger in tones and words?" — a question she asks with genuine wonder rather than false modesty. Her voice, clear and slightly nasal in a way that keeps her from ever sounding like a torch singer, climbs into an unguarded upper register at the chorus, and the production lets it stand exposed above the parade. The song is a deliberate rebuke to the indie-rock convention that ecstasy is less serious than grief; it earns its joy because the listener knows the two albums that preceded it. As a Korean American artist accepting a moment of arrival with the same voice she used for mourning, Zauner made joy sound like a discipline. Ideal for the first bright morning after a hard season.