“Milwaukee! It’s good to be back,” yelled Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast a few songs into the band’s headlining set at Summerfest’s BMO Harris Pavilion. In the pale strobelight shining down on her, a swarm of lakeflies buzzed around the singer. “There are so many bugs on this stage!”

The day leading up to the show was a long one for everyone involved. The band had just hopped off a 14-hour flight from Seoul, South Korea, having played another festival there in the days prior. The audience had just beared the first day of a biblically intense 72-hour heatwave, with temperatures reaching up to 95º just hours before. Even after the sun went down, the air was sticky under the covered pavilion, but the show that we got was more than worth the heat exhaustion.

Japanese Breakfast’s last stint at Summerfest wasn’t too long ago, back in 2023 when the band was still touring their critically acclaimed breakout Jubilee. Saturday night’s set was all about the band’s fourth and latest album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women). That didn’t mean their old material was left in the dust, though – Zauner and the group are at the point in their run where they can pull tracks from every corner of their discography to build a career-spanning setlist.

The show opened with two lush, sweeping arrangements of Melancholy Brunettes opening tracks “Here Is Someone” and “Orlando in Love”. The full-band sound, adorned with tinges of saxophone and violin, felt like a new coat of paint on songs that the crowd had come to know and love. Zauner lit the wick of a lantern and placed it down on center stage before blasting into “Honey Water”, the set’s first real, noisy rager.

“Oh, there’s some emotionally stunted people in the audience tonight!” The group’s best songs channel the intertwinings of grief, heartache and joy into poetic, yearn-worthy anthems and waltzes. The soft-spoken balladry of “Winter in LA” and “Kokomo, IN” back-to-back definitely hit me where it hurts, as did “The Body Is a Blade”. There was no shortage of jubilant moments, though – the infectious groove of “Slide Tackle” was an easy highlight, as Zauner bounced around her bandmates in a frilly white dress.

The show’s pinnacle was ultimately Jubilee closer “Posing for Cars”, the first song the band played after being cheered on for an encore after a brief exit. Zauner started the song unaccompanied on guitar, as her bandmates entered the fold one-by-one – giving way to a blistering wall of sound by the end of the track’s near seven-minute runtime. While the band’s newer material is more spare and mellow, their show in the unbearable heat felt like a celebration of everything that Japanese Breakfast has represented as a group over the years. Their debut album will turn ten next year, and if Saturday’s set proved anything, it’s that the group has more than enough steam to continue one of the best runs in modern indie rock.