10 of the best modern breakup songs
Nick Cave once wrote, “A broken heart — that grief of love — is always love’s true destination. This is the covenant of love.” He makes the point that to love, in any form, is to submit to eventual heartbreak. So it’s no wonder that since the dawn of time, the topic of heartache has been one of the most common subjects in art. In modern times too, these artists are proving to be masters of the feeling.
It’s a specific and uniquely painful experience. As anyone who has ever been through it will attest, there is no pain in the world quite like heartbreak. It’s external and internal, as we’re left thinking endlessly about this other person who left or was left behind, cursing them or missing them while also introspecting so deeply on what went wrong.
It’s often an experience of total emotional reckoning, causing people to look back over lengthy periods of time, combing back through the relationship to find the crack. Sometimes it’s obvious but sometimes, heartbreak feels like a totally nonsensical thing that hits out of nowhere. Both forms have proved greatly inspiring to artist new and old.
But heartbreak isn’t just reserved for the one who were broken up with. It’s often just as painful for the ones that ended it all, with artists turning their pen to the experience of the ‘bad guy’ too for heartache anthems for the other side of things.
From indie tunes to classic jazz, these modern heartbreak tracks perfectly articulate the complexities and devastation of losing the one you love.
The 10 best modern heartbreak songs:
Jacob Diamond – ‘Two Years Of Breaking Up’
Jacob Diamond’s album Yes Angel is a masterclass in tricky feelings. Never one to approach emotion from its widest, most common vantage point, it instead crawls into the odd little places in between and the complexities in the cracks rather than cliches.
‘Two Years Of Breaking Up’ is a prime example as Diamond combs back through a relationship from the view people of external people looking in seeing a seemingly normal situationship while the pair inside the house remember all the red flags and issues that plagued them to an eventual split. It’s uniquely cathartic, dealing with the awful wonderment that perhaps your love was doomed from the start and the difficulty in accepting that. It’s not heartbreaking in the typical way, with an oddly upbeat build and catchy hook. But it’s in the intricacies of the lyricism that the hurt is held.
Katie Gregson-MacLeod – ‘White Lies’
A new poet laureate of heartbreak emerged the second Katie Gregson-MacLeod’s early demo of ‘Complex’ blew up. But while that track is devastating, her discography is packed full of endlessly beautiful and effortlessly gut-wrenching odes to love, loss, and the difficult states in between as she manages to convey such heavy emotion with cutting ease.
“I do time to time picture someone giving me / The version of my life / I imagined first with you,” she sings, mourning what could have been before kicking it up a gear in the bridge. With a devastated pointed finger, she cries, “And who knows what that would’ve looked like / A world where you didn’t / Keep changing your mind?”
It’s a particularly horrifying type of heartbreak when the person you love pushes you to a breaking point, causing you to question why you’re still hanging on while still being desperate to keep loving them. ‘White Lies’ captures that perfectly, translating that difficult state into a stunning ballad.
Chappell Roan – ‘Coffee’
While best known for her upbeat theatrical hits like ‘Hot To Go!’ or ‘Good Look Babe’, Chappell Roan’s talent stretches to the realm of heartbreak ballads, too. ‘Coffee’ is so simple, telling a tale as old of a time of wanting to be friends with a past love but being unable to stomach it, but it’s such with heart-aching beauty and conviction.
“If I didn’t love you, it would be fine,” she howls as if she’s unable to deny the feeling despite how much she’d like to try. With Roan’s incredible vocal range on display here and the power of her voice matched by an emotional vulnerability peaking through, it’s the perfect song to sing along to when in need of some heartbreak catharsis.
Boygenius – ‘Cool About It’
This one has a bite to it, and with each verse, that bite gets more and more vicious. All three members of Boygenius are absolute masters of devastation. Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker have mastered this craft in their solo work, so when they come together, passing verses back and forth on this acoustic track, their combined power is absolutely lethal. So if currently heartbroken, proceed with caution.
Telling the story of meeting up with someone you once loved or someone who broke your heart, ‘Cool About It’ deals with the complex battle between inner thoughts and external actions, of wanting to be honest about your feelings but wanting to keep this person close, yet knowing that their closeness is hurting you. Dacus sings that perfectly, “I came prepared for absolution, if you’d only ask / So I take some offence when you say, ‘No regrets’.”
But it’s in the sparse final moments when Bridgers takes the mic that the final, devastating blow is delivered; “I’ll pretend being with you doesn’t feel like drowning / Tellin’ you it’s nice to see how good you’re doing / Even though we know it isn’t true.”
Muna – ‘Stayaway’
But heartbreak isn’t just reserved for the person who has been dumped. As much as we’d all like to deny the fact, breakups are often just as hard for the person who pulled the plug and walked away. Muna wrote an anthem for them, capturing the tension and the push-and-pull of knowing what you did is for the best but also struggling to stick to it.
As the verses swell and swell, it all breaks apart in the song’s climactic bridge. Katie Gavin delivers a monologue-like section that makes the heart beat faster as if the narrator is holding their breath, suffocating under the weight of their thoughts. “If I start thinking, I’ll think of the time when / You said that you loved me, you said I was perfect / You said you were sorry, you said you were selfish / If I don’t stop it, before I know it / All the bad things never happened / You never lied or treated me bad and / If you did then you’ll wish you hadn’t,” she sings, spiralling out in a supporting anthem for anyone who’s ever had to be the ‘bad guy’.
Laufey – ‘Promise’
With a background in jazz and classical music, Laufey can be trusted to write an incredibly evocative heartbreak track. From the composition of the instrumental through to the story ark of the lyricism, ‘Promise’ draws you in so vividly that even if you’re not currently going through a heartbreak, you’ll feel like you are.
Laufey is establishing herself as a new master of the art form, merging classical instrumentation with distinctly modern and relatable lyrics. Other tracks like ‘Goddess’, ‘Let You Break My Heart Again’ and ‘Haunted’ could all have made this list too. With a Grammy under her belt already, her knack for deeply moving and emotive music is being rightfully recognised.
Alek Olsen – ‘Someday I’ll Get It’
With a runtime of only one minute thirty and only a scattering of lyrics, Alek Olsen’s track is sparse, but it clearly needs nothing more to be utterly devastating. From the opening line, it stabs right to the heart; “I think of you all of the time, now that you’re gone.”
It’s so intimate, it almost feels like a whisper in the dark, as if Olsen is simply sat home, lonely in his room, going through it. With the lyrics also feeling like a deeply private and vulnerable moment, the song feels almost painfully honest, like it just poured out in a moment of heartache.
Mitski – ‘I Want You’
For people going through a heartbreak, Mitski should come with a health warning. As the reigning queen of so-called ‘Sad Girl Music’, that weak label doesn’t do justice to the power and punch of Mitski’s heartbreak poetry. In modern times, there is truly no artist as poignant when it comes to articulating dark feelings.
Attempting to save a relationship that was always one-sided, ‘I Want You’ is a devastating, delusional plea from the heartbroken, begging for a second chance. “You’re coming back / And it’s the end of the world / We’re starting over and I love you darlin’ / And I am done, dear,” Mitski daydreams, imagining how a second chance could save everything, but knowing deep down it wouldn’t.
Julia Jacklin – ‘I Don’t Know How To Keep Loving You’
Julia Jacklin herself admitted at a recent London gig that she fears no new song she writes will ever be as good as this. It seems that when she finally got the song’s simple yet devastating central line down, that outpouring of perfectly articulated emotion could never be beaten.
“Don’t know how to keep loving you, now that I know you so well,” Jacklin sings over and over as if begging for advice or simply being hit by the grief and helplessness of the sentiment again and again. It’s a track about the trials of a long-term relationship and the first waves of upset as she begins to reckon with the inevitability of it ending and her inability to save it.
Molly Payton – ‘In Your Arms’
Molly Payton’s voice seems to have feeling built in as the cracking tone of her timbre holds so much feeling. Pair that with an incredibly written heartbreak track, from the lyrics to the way it builds and collapses in the instrumental, and ‘In Your Arms’ becomes one of the best and most painfully underrated modern heartache songs.
“Hey, it’s okay that you changed your mind / I just wish that you hadn’t spent so much time / Being honest with me / You were always so kind / So it’s hard to move on / Baby there’s no one better,” she sings, grappling with how to handle heartbreak when the ‘bad guy’ was actually nice, it was merely the timing that was wrong. It’s an anthem for anyone ever affiliated with the right person at the wrong time.
