Breakup albums: heartbreak, set to music

The breakup album all others answer to. Written as his marriage collapsed, it's Dylan at his most direct and most devastating — “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Idiot Wind,” “If You See Her, Say Hello.”

A band falling apart in real time — two couples splitting up while making the record together. They turned all that wreckage into the most perfect pop album ever made. Heartbreak has never sounded so good.

Retro soul with a modern wound. Winehouse sang about a doomed relationship with such honesty that the whole album aches. One of the defining records of its century.

The biggest-selling breakup album of the modern era, and deservedly so. “Someone Like You” and “Rolling in the Deep” turned one collapse into songs the whole world cried to.

When Beck's long relationship ended, the genre-hopping prankster made his most sincere, sorrowful record — lush, slow and unguarded. The sound of a man sitting in the wreckage.

Recorded alone in a Wisconsin cabin after a breakup, this is heartbreak as isolation — a falsetto, an acoustic guitar, and a new folk standard born out of solitude.

Heartbreak turned into power. Lemonade moves through betrayal, fury and finally reconciliation, and reinvented what a pop album could be along the way.

The album where Swift perfected the breakup song as short story. “All Too Well” alone is a masterclass in remembering every small detail of something that's gone.

Gen Z's breakup album. Rodrigo channels first heartbreak into pop-punk fury and piano-ballad devastation in equal measure — proof the form will never get old.