Breakup Albums That Make Room for More Than One Feeling

Fleetwood Mac Play “Go Your Own Way” and “Songbird” back to back. The first gives you a chorus big enough to shout along to, even if the hurt in the verses makes the freedom sound doubtful. Christine McVie follows it with a promise of love at the piano. The album gives each feeling its own singer and lets both stand.

Marvin Gaye The groove in “Is That Enough” keeps moving while Gaye picks through the costs of his divorce. By “Falling in Love Again,” he sounds willing to imagine a different future. Then a brief reprise of “When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You” brings the old question back. The chance to start over and the need to make sense of the past get almost the same breath.

Bob Dylan “Idiot Wind” lets the insults fly, then brings the singer into the wreckage alongside the person he’s blaming. Later, “If You See Her, Say Hello” gives him room to miss somebody without trying to win the argument. The closer, “Buckets of Rain,” can sound playful after all that, even as it makes one more bid for affection.

Joni Mitchell The romance in “A Case of You” still feels worth remembering, even as Mitchell puts some distance between herself and the person she’s singing to. It sits between the regret and escape fantasy of “River” and the barroom conversation in “The Last Time I Saw Richard.” Ending on that conversation leaves room for a little hope and plenty of doubt about what comes next.

Björk “Stonemilker” opens with the tentative hope of getting two people to talk honestly. By the time “Black Lake” arrives, the strings hang in the air and the beats come and go like interruptions. “Family” makes the breakup about the shape of a household as well as the loss of a partner. The album gives those losses different sounds.

Lorde There’s room at this party for the rush of a crush and the feeling of wanting to go home. “The Louvre” makes falling for somebody sound giddy, and the next song, “Liability,” feels like the moment the room clears. The dance beat on “Perfect Places” gets everyone moving again, with the question of what they’re looking for still hanging there.

Waxahatchee Katie Crutchfield starts with the full-band charge of “Never Been Wrong.” The pace loosens on “Recite Remorse,” and by the acoustic closer, “Fade,” the singer has enough quiet to hear how much of herself went missing. Play this one when a furious first song and a subdued last one both sound right.

Adele “My Little Love” makes the fallout a conversation between a mother and her child. The album changes gears later with the gently swinging “All Night Parking” interlude, then comes back to a voice and piano for “To Be Loved.” “Love Is a Game” follows with a fuller arrangement and a little distance on the whole affair.

Kacey Musgraves On “camera roll,” a late-night scroll lands Musgraves back in happier years. She lets that temporary doubt sit inside a three-act album that has room for regret, anger, and the decision to leave. Closing with Violeta Parra’s “gracias a la vida” gives her a different language for the good and the terrible.

FKA twigs In “thousand eyes,” leaving a relationship means facing the world the two of you shared. “holy terrain” makes room for desire again, with Future answering her in his own verse. Then “cellophane” closes on a voice and piano so exposed that it feels as if the room has emptied.

The Mountain Goats The couple on this record are fictional, and “No Children” lets them be funny and vicious at the same time. “Old College Try” arrives later with a much gentler sound and a promise to keep going, however unwise that sounds by then. Hearing the whole record makes the second song as unsettling as the first.

Taylor Swift “All Too Well” lingers on the details you remember after everything else is over. “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” makes a group shout out of drawing a line. The original album closes with “Begin Again,” a much smaller scene about a date that goes better than expected. A record this tangled earns that little lift.

Beck “Paper Tiger” puts a restless rhythm under those looming strings, while “Lost Cause” settles into the sound of somebody who has stopped trying to change the outcome. Stay for “Sunday Sun,” where the arrangement swells and the record feels briefly less hemmed in. Even this famously subdued breakup album has more than one pace.

Lily Allen The title track opens with a career win and then lets an uneasy phone call change the temperature. Later, “Dallas Major” finds a flash of comedy in dating again. “Fruityloop” lets the narrator look back on the marriage with more clarity than she could manage in the opening scene. The jokes and the dread make each other sharper.

Ariana Grande “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” takes the ache of leaving and gives it a beat that keeps pushing forward. “imperfect for you” makes room for a different sort of closeness, and “ordinary things” ends with a spoken contribution from Grande’s grandmother. That last voice changes the scale of the album from an argument between two people to a bigger question about what makes a relationship worth staying in.

Death Cab for Cutie “Punching the Flowers” is the sound of having too much energy and nowhere useful to put it. Later, the lift in “Trap Door” and “The Flavor of Metal” makes the idea of starting over feel possible before it feels certain. A good one to put on when you want drums that match your mood and melodies that can pull you somewhere else.