Yearning: albums that ache for what they can't name

Four songs stretch past seven minutes on Hats (1989), and none of them are in a hurry to resolve. Paul Buchanan sings like a man watching a city through rain, wanting to call someone he won't call. The Glasgow trio spent years and a small fortune building these synthetic rooms, and the patience shows: this is longing with the lights of the whole town reflected in it.

Elizabeth Fraser mostly isn't singing words here, and it doesn't matter, because the sound of her voice on Heaven or Las Vegas (1990) is the meaning. The 4AD trio made a record about new parenthood and coming addiction that lands as pure ache regardless of what you can make out. It's the warmest thing they did, and the saddest underneath the shimmer.

The British press mocked Souvlaki (1993) on release and the band nearly didn't survive it. Thirty years later it's the shoegaze record everyone means when they say the word. "Dagger" is two people falling apart with total tenderness; the guitars don't roar so much as glow. Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead built a whole vocabulary for missing someone in the same room as you.

The 1993 self-titled with the rollercoaster on the cover is Mark Kozelek at his most unguarded, before the persona hardened. Songs crawl. He repeats a line until it stops being a lyric and becomes a wound you keep pressing. Slowcore has meaner and prettier records, but few this nakedly homesick for a childhood the singer half hates and can't leave.

Stratosphere (1998) sounds like it was recorded in a basement that was slowly filling with fog, which is roughly true. The San Jose trio buried their melodies under tape hiss and drift, and a generation of bedroom kids on the internet dug them back out two decades later. It's the yearning of staring at a ceiling at 3am, weightless and stuck at once.

The house on the cover became a shrine. American Football (1999) is nine songs about the end of things, played in guitar tunings that ring like they're apologizing. Mike Kinsella was barely out of his teens and already writing about goodbyes he wasn't ready for. Midwest emo has louder records; this is the quiet one everyone actually returns to.

Simon Reynolds coined the phrase "post-rock" reviewing Hex (1994), and the record earns the term without ever being cold about it. It floats between jazz, dub and something almost ecclesiastical, Graham Sutton half-whispering over spaces that keep opening up under him. A London record that sounds like the last train home, empty.

Trish Keenan sang like a transmission from a future that already felt old. The Noise Made by People (2000) wraps her cool, exact voice in analog warmth and library-music strangeness, and the effect is homesickness for a decade nobody actually lived through. Keenan died in 2011, which only sharpened how much this record already sounded like something slipping away.

Angelo Badalamenti wrote it, David Lynch wrote the words, and Julee Cruise floated above the whole thing like she was already a memory. Floating Into the Night (1989) gave Twin Peaks its theme and gave dream pop one of its founding documents. "Falling" is desire in slow motion, sweet enough to hurt.

A band that should have broken up made the record of their lives instead. Deserter's Songs (1998) is symphonic and cracked, full of saws and bowed strings and Jonathan Donahue singing like a kid who saw something in the woods he can't describe. It's Catskills folklore rebuilt as widescreen ache, and it saved the band from disappearing.

Robert Smith turned thirty, decided pop had been a mistake, and made the most beautiful depression of his career. Disintegration (1989) is enormous, slow, drenched in reverb, and completely sincere about wanting a love it's already mourning. "Pictures of You" is six minutes of looking at someone who's gone. It remains the one to reach for.

Teen Dream (2010) is where the Baltimore duo went from lovely to essential. Victoria Legrand's organ and Alex Scally's slide guitar circle the same handful of feelings, and the songs keep almost breaking through into joy before pulling back. "Take Care" is a promise made to someone who might not be listening anymore. Warm, patient, quietly devastating.

Liz Harris made Ruins (2014) on a residency in Portugal, mostly just piano and voice and whatever the room and the frogs outside gave her. You can hear a microwave beep near the end. It's the most naked thing in her catalogue, love songs recorded so close they feel overheard rather than performed. Yearning with the reverb finally switched off.

Written after his estranged mother's death, Carrie & Lowell (2015) trades the marching bands and concept-album scaffolding for a whisper and a guitar. Stevens tries to grieve a woman he barely got to know, and what comes out is closer to longing than mourning: he wants a childhood he didn't have. Hard to sit through, harder to stop.

Blonde (2016) is the great yearning record of its generation and it knows it. Ocean pitches his voice up and down chasing people and years he can't get back, over guitars that barely hold a shape. There are no drums on half of it and it doesn't need them. "Self Control" and "White Ferrari" are the sound of remembering someone in real time.

Natalie Mering sings like the 1970s soft-rock she loves, then aims all that lushness at climate dread and loneliness in the streaming age. Titanic Rising (2019) is orchestral and gorgeous and quietly panicked underneath. "Movies" wants to be swept away and knows the swelling strings are a trick, which is the whole ache of it.

Rocket (2017) is a Philadelphia kid's home recordings dressed up in banjo, violin and pitch-shifted vocals, and it's stranger and sweeter than that makes it sound. Alex Giannascoli writes about dogs, farms and half-remembered people with an offhandedness that suddenly turns your chest over. The lo-fi warmth is a cover for how much these songs miss things.