The upcoming record will mark Zauner’s first solo work since 2019, when she released a pair of standalone singles – a cover of Tears For Fears‘ ‘Head Over Heels’ and an original song titled ‘Essentially’. In September last year, Zauner also teamed up with Crying’s Ryan Galloway for a four-track EP, ‘Pop Songs 2020’, under the group name Bumper. Crying In H Mart, arriving on April 20 this year via Knopf Publishing. The book, based on Zauner’s 2018 essay in The New Yorker, will explore how the death of the musician’s mother forced a reckoning with her Korean-American identity. Zauner said of the memoir in a press release: “I wrote two albums worth of material in an attempt to encapsulate all of that heavy darkness, confusion and loneliness, and then I spent another three years writing pages and pages to try and capture my mother’s brilliant character and spirit, what it was like to be raised by a Korean immigrant in a small west coast town with very little diversity, the intense shame I felt towards my mixed-race identity and how my embrace of Korean food and culture helped me come to terms with that upbringing, allowed me to reconnect with her memory.”