Best breakup albums: the ones that name names

Sixteen ballads in a row with no up-tempo escape hatch, arranged by Nelson Riddle and recorded in early 1955 while Sinatra's marriage to Ava Gardner fell apart in public. Capitol sold it as a mood record because nobody had the vocabulary for anything else yet.

It is one of the first pop albums built to be heard whole and in a single emotional key, which means every record below is working from a template he cut at three in the morning.

Written after her relationship with Graham Nash ended and she went travelling, and recorded with almost nobody else in the room. Its reputation as a fragile record is a misreading.

"River" is a confession of running out on someone at Christmas, and "A Case of You" is as much an inventory as a love song. Mitchell barely edits herself here, and that refusal is the whole achievement.

Jerry Wexler took Nelson to Muscle Shoals in 1974 and got the whole album down in about two days. Side one tells the divorce from the wife's side, side two from the husband's, and Nelson always insisted none of it was autobiography.

It is the only one of these that gives the other person equal airtime, and the wife's side is the better half. Everybody else just testifies for themselves.

Cut in New York in September 1974, shelved after Dylan went home for Christmas and played it for his brother David, then partly re-recorded in Minneapolis that December with a band of local players. Five songs came back louder and less wounded, which is why the New York test pressings still get traded like relics.

"Idiot Wind" is the sound of a man winning an argument the other party never got to attend. Dylan spent the next fifty years explaining that the songs are short stories, which nobody has ever believed, least of all Sara.

Two couples came apart inside the band while it was being recorded at the Record Plant in Sausalito: John and Christine McVie divorcing, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks finished. Mick Fleetwood's marriage went down at the same time.

The cruel part is the arrangement. Buckingham wrote "Go Your Own Way" about Nicks and she had to sing backing vocals on it, then answer with "Dreams," night after night, for the next forty years. It became one of the biggest-selling albums ever made. Most of the people who own it never noticed what it was.

The divorce settlement was the concept. Gaye's lawyer arranged for Anna Gordy to take $600,000 out of the advance and royalties of his next album, so Gaye set out to make something worthless and hand it over as a joke.

Then he got interested. What arrived in 1978 was a double album that argues, sulks, itemises and occasionally begs, with a song called "You Can Leave, but It's Going to Cost You" sitting in the middle of it. Motown buried it. It is the strangest financial instrument in the history of soul.

By the time their last album came out at the end of 1981, both couples inside the band had split, and the record sounds like four people who have stopped pretending they are a family business.

"When All Is Said and Done" is Frida singing Björn's account of a marriage ending, which is about as close to open-heart surgery as Swedish pop ever got. The synthesizers are cold on purpose. Nobody sounds like they want to be in the room.

The first version, funded and produced by Gerry Rafferty, was finished and then abandoned when no label would take it. Joe Boyd re-recorded most of it in a few days in November 1981 and put it out on his own Hannibal label the following March, by which point the marriage was over.

The legend is really about the 1982 American tour, where two people sang these songs at each other in front of paying audiences. "Wall of Death" closes it with the blackest joke in British folk rock: the fairground ride you should take is the one that pins you to the wall.

Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell had known each other since childhood and had just stopped being a couple. Brian Eno turned up for two songs, "Sing" and "Here She Comes," mostly because he liked them.

The British press buried it in 1993 and spent the next twenty years quietly reversing. Strip the reverb off "Dagger" and there is nothing underneath but a man apologising. That is why it survives while so much shoegaze from that year now sounds like weather.

After seven years with Eric Rosse, who was also her producer, ended, Amos produced herself for the first time and recorded most of the album in a church in Delgany, County Wicklow, finishing in New Orleans.

The harpsichord is the tell. This is a woman refusing the pretty piano she was known for and picking an instrument that cannot be softened. It is the least polite record here and the one least interested in being liked back.

The Bad Seeds hold back to almost nothing: piano, brushes, the occasional organ. Cave puts down the murder ballads and the biblical characters and writes about Viviane Carneiro and PJ Harvey by name and by hair colour.

It was a genuine risk in 1997 and it reset his whole career. Everything sincere he has done since, up to and including the late records, starts here.

Damon Albarn's eight years with Justine Frischmann ended, William Orbit took over production, and Graham Coxon was finally allowed to play whatever he wanted. The result is Blur's messiest and best album.

"Tender" gets the gospel choir and the false comfort. "No Distance Left to Run" is the one that costs something: Albarn admitting he still dreams about her and hopes she is with someone who makes her happier. Then Coxon's guitar dismantles the room for another six minutes.

John Darnielle had been writing about the Alpha Couple, a married pair drinking their way through mutual destruction, for the best part of a decade on boombox tapes. Tallahassee moves them into a rotting house in Florida and into a real studio for the first time, on 4AD in 2002.

Being invented lets Darnielle be crueller than anyone writing about their own divorce. "No Children" is now a room-wide singalong, hundreds of people cheerfully bellowing a wish that both partners die alone. Nobody seems troubled by this.

The joke machine switched off. After his long relationship with Leigh Limon ended, Beck took twelve plainly written songs to Nigel Godrich and let his father, David Campbell, write the string arrangements.

Half his audience thought he had lost his nerve when it came out in 2002. The other half noticed that a man who had spent a decade hiding behind irony had run out of places to stand.

Written during a split from Blake Fielder-Civil and recorded with Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, with the Dap-Kings supplying the Motown chassis. The old-soul arrangements are not nostalgia, they are cover: a form built for heartbreak, borrowed so she could say worse things inside it.

"Tears Dry on Their Own" runs a Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell groove underneath a woman talking herself out of a doomed reunion. She loses the argument, and she knows it while she is singing.

The cabin story got told so often it turned into a brand, so here is the plain version: Justin Vernon's band DeYarmond Edison had broken up, a relationship had ended, he had mono, and he went to his father's hunting cabin in northwestern Wisconsin for the winter. He self-released the results in 2007, and Jagjaguwar picked it up in 2008.

It launched about a thousand bad falsetto imitations. It is still better than all of them, mostly because the recording is so obviously unsupervised.

Recorded with Peter Katis in Connecticut and released on Fat Cat in 2008, this is the record where nobody is protecting their dignity. Scott Hutchison itemises the aftermath of a breakup down to the level of who is still sleeping in whose bed and what he said to her at the party.

A Scottish accent carrying that much specific shame turned out to travel further than anyone expected. Hutchison died in 2018, and his fans have been holding this album closer ever since.

His engagement to Alexis Phifer was over and his mother had died the year before, so he built a record out of a TR-808, Auto-Tune and almost no rapping, and released it in November 2008 into open ridicule.

Half of what happened to rap in the following decade came out of it: the singing, the space, the permission to sound wounded on a major label. Whatever you think of the man now, the fact stands.

The songs are stamped by the month: nine months before, five months before, two months after the end of her relationship with Matthew Barney. A leak forced the release forward to January 2015, which suited a record that already felt like something exposed too early.

Arca and The Haxan Cloak give the strings something to fight against. "Black Lake" is ten minutes of a woman telling an absent man exactly how he failed, and it is one of the hardest things she has ever recorded.

Her Warp debut arrives in three movements: the end of one relationship, the loose and undefined stretch that follows, then the next thing starting and beginning to rhyme with the last one.

What sets it apart from everything else here is that the desire never switches off. Most breakup albums are about absence. This one keeps going to the club, keeps meeting people, and stays honest about what that fixes and what it does not.

Eight years after Body Talk, made after her split from Max Vitali and the death of her friend and collaborator Christian Falk in 2014, and sequenced roughly in the order the songs were written. You can hear her getting better across it.

The title track is the argument. It sets up everything a Robyn single is supposed to deliver and then refuses to drop, holding one warm swimming pulse for four minutes instead. Nobody dances alone this time. She just stops needing the release.