“All our celebrities keep dying,” mourned Michelle Zauner (aka Japanese Breakfast) on her second album, 2017’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet, “while the cruel men continue to win.” This somber juxtaposition opens “Till Death,” a lullaby-like thank you from Zauner to her husband for comforting her through a year of anguish. On it, she lists the cruelties she’s endured: grief and PTSD, nightmare-driven insomnia, worries about inheriting genetic disease. In 2014, she lost her mother to pancreatic cancer, a tragedy that hung over her debut studio album, Psychopomp, and drove her to further embrace her Korean identity, as described in her upcoming memoir, Crying in H Mart. But after five years of dwelling in grief, Zauner wants to switch the gears: “For me, a third record should feel bombastic,” she says.

True to that promise, “Be Sweet,” the debut single off of her upcoming album Jubilee, is more buoyant and colorful than most of her previous music—a shift even signaled by the album cover, where she is dressed in baby yellow, surrounded by golden persimmons that look like party ornaments. Written with Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing, the song rattles with energy, trading previous influences like shoegaze and Pacific Northwest indie rock for danceable ’80s synth-pop. Here, she goads a lover into being a little more affectionate: “Be sweet to me, baby,” she demands, backed by bright harmonies. “I want to belieeeve in you.” Less knotty and outwardly personal than her prior music, the song is accompanied by a hammy, X-Files-inspired music video starring Mannequin Pussy’s Missy as her partner-in-crime. We may be contending with grief and illness on a mass scale, but Japanese Breakfast gives us a way to resist sorrow.