Miley Cyrus was 20 years old when she crashed into pop's upper ranks with "Bangerz," a surprisingly sharp tale of anguish, fury, and newfound independence cleverly disguised as a blunt wrecking ball.

"Bangerz" arrived mere weeks before Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth confirmed they'd broken off their engagement. Rumors had been swirling about the longtime couple for months — Cyrus was forced to deny cheating allegations, while Hemsworth was facing similar rumors of his own — and they'd already postponed their wedding.

This was the climate that fueled "Bangerz," Cyrus' first album on a major label after leaving the Disney Channel and Hollywood Records. The move gave Cyrus an increased level of authorship at just the right time; she had a grown-up budget, a captive audience, a complex story to tell, and the nerve to do it justice.

Most people know the album's flagship single, "Wrecking Ball," and for good reason — but it's the dialogue between grief and relief, the unsettled swirl of lovesick ballads ("Adore You," "My Darlin'"), gut-wrenching anthems ("Drive," "Maybe You're Right," "Someone Else"), and devil-may-care party-starters ("We Can't Stop," "#GETITRIGHT," "Do My Thang") that truly highlight Cyrus' range and stamina.

Throughout his time in the public eye, Tyler, the Creator has kept his dating history relatively private. His Grammy-winning album "Igor" follows that lead by cloaking itself in multiple layers of character work.

Still, Tyler reveals more than enough in his songwriting. "Igor" is thick with private confessions and tender pleas: "I'm your puppet / You control me," Tyler admits in track eight, immediately after begging "No, don't shoot me down!" in a song frankly titled "A Boy Is A Gun." Even the tracks that present as love songs, like Tyler's beloved hit "Earfquake," are stained by anxiety and desperation ("Don't leave, it's my fault").

The album ends with a one-two punch that tells a Hemingway-esque tragedy with titles alone: "I Don't Love You Anymore," "Are We Still Friends?"

Liz Phair's bluntly delivered debut, "Exile in Guyville," earned her a reputation for singing about the kind of stuff women aren't really supposed to talk about: resenting and desiring men in equal measure; having "unpure, unchaste" thoughts; secretly longing for a sweet boyfriend and "all that stupid old shit, like letters and sodas," but having meaningless sex instead.

The concept album — which was partially inspired by "Exile on Main St." by the Rolling Stones — also made Phair the poster girl for refracting rock 'n' roll through a feminine lens.

But to hear Phair tell it, she didn't intend to tap into a movement. She was just being honest and loud at the same time.

"Being emotionally forthright was the most radical thing I did. And that was taken to mean something bigger in terms of women's roles in society and women's roles in music," she said of the album's legacy. "I just wanted people who thought I was not worth talking to, to listen to me."

Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill" is another landmark of '90s rock — the original golden era for pissed-off young women who write their own songs. The album spent 12 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Just three years after its release, it became the third female-led album in history to be certified diamond.

As legend has it (though never confirmed by the author herself), "Jagged Little Pill" emerged from Morissette's 1992 relationship with Dave Coulier. She was in her late teens at the time, while he was in his early 30s. ("I think I may have really hurt this woman," Coulier later recalled thinking when he heard her songs on the radio.)

In the opening track, Morissette claims that all she really wants is patience, deliverance, and "a way to calm the angry voice" — but in reality, she also wants to set the record straight with her ex, a motivation she cops to in the very next track. "I'm here to remind you," she famously sings, "of the mess you left when you went away."

"You Oughta Know" and its 11 fellow scorchers have inspired countless other women to bare their teeth and spill their guts, from Beyoncé and Halsey to Olivia Rodrigo and Reneé Rapp, not to mention a bespoke Broadway musical.

Some people insist that teenage love isn't "real" love, or that it doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things. Those people have never listened to "Drivers License."

Olivia Rodrigo's "Sour," which houses that smash hit, is a quintessential cathartic breakup album in the vein of her pop-rock foremothers, yet artfully updated for a new generation. The production takes cool, unexpected detours, while the melodies dip and soar to suit Rodrigo's wide vocal range.

Through it all, Rodrigo's guileless songwriting remains the star of the show.

As Phair, Morissette, Avril Lavigne, and Taylor Swift did before her, Rodrigo poured everything she felt into her lyrics, civility and decorum be damned. Whether it burst forth in a fury, gushed out in a meltdown, or oozed slowly from her pores, she bottled and savored each impulse. We drank it up right away.

Ariana Grande's fifth and best album is impossible to detach from the true story that set the scene: Shortly after getting engaged to comedian Pete Davidson, her longtime friend and ex-boyfriend, Mac Miller, died of an accidental overdose.

By Grande's own account, Miller's death sent her into a feverish, drunken spiral. In quick succession, she broke up with Davidson and assembled her friends to help her process both losses.

For Grande and her inner circle, as with many creatives across history, that meant channeling pain into art. Grande recently credited the creative process with helping to save her life. "It was made with urgency, and it was a means of survival," she told The Hollywood Reporter.

"Thank U, Next" is anchored by its titular track, unleashed in the wake of her failed engagement. It's the most raw, self-referential, and iconic song in Grande's catalog, name-dropping her ex-fiancé as well as three other ex-boyfriends as proof of her gratitude and growth. By doing so, Grande also proved she had far more courage and moxie than your average pop star.

"I understand that like, to a lot of people, I'm not a real person," Grande said of the true-to-life lyrics. "But at the end of the day, these are people and relationships... It's real shit to me."

Amid a swirl of scandalous headlines and salacious rumors, Grande turned her plea for humanity into a hit. "Thank U, Next" became her first No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 and empowered Grande to enter an era of radical honesty.

The album arrived three months later and met the high mark its lead single had set. The 12-song tracklist is packed with poignant, personal details that expose the depths of grief, guilt, and self-sabotage — balanced by the highs of friendship, resilience, and self-discovery.

Unlike Etta James' seminal debut album, which includes swooning first-dance staples like "At Last" and "A Sunday Kind of Love," her second album is blues in its truest form.

The tracklist begins with a lonely plea: "Don't cry baby / Dry your eyes, and let's be sweethearts again." It ends lonely, too, but the pleading is gone. In "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," James is resigned to her seclusion, declining invitations for dances and dates: "My mind is more at ease / But never, never, nevertheless, why stir up memories?"

"The Second Time Around" is a classic tragedy, in which James is cast as a love-sodden, self-described fool. But this isn't an album for wallowing. James' warm, earthy voice makes the alone time sound inviting — a chance for tears and diary entries and going "plum nuts" without judgment, guilt, or embarrassment.

Willie Nelson is one of the most prolific and consistent singer-songwriters of all time, having released over 100 studio albums since the early '60s.

To this day, even in such a crowded discography, "Phases and Stages" stands out as a neatly conceived, exquisitely executed exercise in empathy.

The album is structured as a divorce story from inverse perspectives: Side A explores the fallout from the wife's worn-out perspective, while Side B flips to the husband's shell-shocked point of view. Concept albums haven't often been attempted in country music — especially not in the '70s — which makes Nelson's coherent vision even more special in retrospect.

"Ordinarily, concept albums strike me as pretentious bores," Chet Flippo opined for Rolling Stone at the time of its release, "but I find 'Phases And Stages' extraordinarily convincing. The oft-married Nelson has obviously seen his share of redeyed dawns."

"AM" was the first Arctic Monkeys album released after the band's frontman, Alex Turner, split from his longtime girlfriend Alexa Chung.

This was a canon event for the indie-sleaze era; the singer-songwriter and fashionista's romance had inspired many reverent blog posts. "My mouth hasn't shut up about you since you kissed it," Turner once wrote to Chung in a Valentine's Day card, which was published by British tabloids after she accidentally left it in a bar. "The idea that you may kiss it again is stuck in my brain." His words sent Tumblr into a frenzy.

When Chung was asked about Turner's reaction to the leak, she told The Guardian, "He said, 'I'm not upset that everyone saw it because that's the truth and I couldn't give a shit.'"

"AM" is Turner's Valentine multiplied by 12, intensified by loss, and set against a backdrop of moody Brit rock. Never have impudent yearning and late-night drug-fueled phone calls sounded so seductive.

Turner describes himself as a "puppet on a string," driven wild by desire and "diamond cutter-shaped heartaches." He stumbles around parties and midnight-soaked streets, rambling about mad sounds, knee socks, cough drop-colored tongues, and the empty hotel suite in his heart. He starts the album by asking, "Do you want me crawling back to you?" By the end of the album, he's still pleading on the floor: "I wanna be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust."

Yes, it's all a bit dramatic, but that's exactly why it works. Turner has mastered how to portray a familiar void in surreal terms — how to turn a phrase and sell it, bold and unblushing, with his signature Yorkshire drawl.

FKA twigs opened the portal to her sophomore album with "Cellophane," an aching lead single that presents the project's catalyst: "Didn't I do it for you? Why don't I do it for you?"

These simple questions illuminate the slippery slope of heartbreak — how often it leads to a shattered ego or an all-out identity crisis. For a famous woman of color forced to contend with tabloid drama, speculation, and racist abuse from her ex-boyfriend's fan base, that risk seems especially steep.

To cope, twigs drew inspiration from another misunderstood woman: Mary Magdalene. The complex biblical figure, a close companion of Jesus, has been flattened by generations of clergymen into a needy damsel at best and a trampy villain at worst. Twigs, who attended Catholic school as a child, felt compelled to reject these male-centric narratives as an adult.

"I am of a generation that was brought up without options in love," twigs told Apple Music. "I was told that as a woman, I should be looked after. It's not whether I choose somebody, but whether somebody chooses me."

The resulting concept album, "Magdalene," transforms the sting of rejection into sacred rage. Twigs reimagines herself as the savior — the one who gets to choose, who gets to write her own story, who gets to decide what pleasure feels like — and crafts a sonic soundscape that reflects her complexity.

As an artist, twigs is more than prepared to tackle these themes, and the album feels more triumphant than its lead single may suggest.

And yet, placing "Cellophane" as the closing track poses another interesting question: Does the search for one's own self, for empowerment and liberation, ever end?

Although Adele's debut, "19," earned two Grammy Awards (including best new artist) and set her up for global success, she hadn't planned for the title to set a precedent — naming each album after her age when she wrote it — until her first "all-or-nothing relationship" fell apart at a formative point in her life.

"When it came to naming this record it was the only relevant thing," Adele told Interview at the time, "because my relationship that the entire record is about was about me coming of age, and 21 is the age when you're suddenly a proper adult and on your own."

Ironically, "21" is characterized by wisdom, poise, and vocal depth that feels earned over several lifetimes, not two short decades. The tracklist, while concise, is loaded with some of the most deeply resonant torch songs in history, from the majestic opener "Rolling in the Deep" to the dignified closer "Someone Like You."

"It's warts and all in my songs, and I think that's why people can relate to them," Adele told Interview. "I don't write songs about a specific, elusive thing. I write about love and everyone fucking knows what it is like to have your heart broken."

In the liner notes for his debut studio album (also shared on his Tumblr page), Frank Ocean detailed how he fell in love with a man who didn't love him back — or, at least, who didn't admit to loving him back until it was too late.

"I felt like I'd only imagined reciprocity for years," Ocean wrote. "I kept up a peculiar friendship with him because I couldn't imagine keeping up my life without him."

As Ocean worked to untangle their intense, epiphanic connection, he wrote "Channel Orange," an album that resists genres and categories by design, but one informed by heartbreak nonetheless.

As its title suggests, the tracklist plays like Ocean is flipping through TV stations, searching for escape in scenes of obscene wealth and historical allegories — yet the author's true state of mind can't help intruding, resulting in songs like "Thinkin Bout You," "Pilot Jones," "Bad Religion," and "Forrest Gump."

"I wrote to keep myself busy and sane," Ocean explained. "I wanted to create worlds that were rosier than mine. I tried to channel overwhelming emotions." He also thanked the man who devastated and inspired him: "To my first love, I'm grateful for you. Grateful that even though it wasn't what I hoped for and even though it was never enough, it was."

At the time of its release, Marvin Gaye's 15th album shocked fans with its candid accounts of malice, regret, and resentment.

Even the title can be interpreted as a curt, not-so-subtle breakup note. In the mid-'70s, Anna Gordy Gaye filed for divorce and reportedly demanded $1 million from her famous husband. Instead, when their divorce was finalized in 1977, Gaye was ordered to give her the advance payment from his forthcoming album plus a hefty cut of the royalties.

The following year, as promised, Gaye released his new album via Motown Records — the label founded by Anna's younger brother, Berry Gordy. He called it, "Here, My Dear."

Gaye's audacious antics didn't end there. The album opens with a spoken-word intro: "I guess I'll have to say that… this album is dedicated to you. Although, perhaps, I may not... be happy… This is what you want." Throughout the tracklist, he skewers his ex-wife for breaking her marriage vow and trying to "shackle" him financially, though he also admits he's ashamed of his own spite. Still, Gaye makes no effort to shroud his accusations in metaphor or ambiguity. Track nine is literally called "Anna's Song."

"Here, My Dear" was a commercial failure in 1978, leading to meager payouts for both parties. However, it's since been venerated as a unique, impressively raw highlight in Gaye's discography — just as he prophesied in "You Can Leave, But It's Going to Cost You."

"You have won the battle," Gaye sings, "Oh, but Daddy's gonna win the war."

Although Taylor Swift's original 2012 album "Red" concluded with a hopeful ballad about finding new love ("Begin Again"), the bulk of the tracklist was always about rejection ("State of Grace," "Red," "All Too Well"), shame ("I Knew You Were Trouble," "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," "The Last Time"), and pining for an imagined future that would never materialize, full of cliffs and thrills and half-kept promises ("Treacherous," "I Almost Do," "Holy Ground").

Even "Begin Again" wouldn't exist without the heartbreak that preceded it. The ballad is as much about Swift's last ex as her shiny new muse — about overcoming distrust and patching old emotional wounds, just to risk the pain all over again.

"Red (Taylor's Version)," released in 2021, doubled down on the album's core themes (and its erratic use of genres) by adding even more breakup anthems ("Better Man," "I Bet You Think About Me," "The Very First Night") and closing with the towering 10-minute version of "All Too Well."

Over a decade after her fateful 21st birthday, Swift was still left wondering where it all went wrong, excavating more memories and pleading for clarity ("Just between us, did the love affair maim you too?"), proving that even the most carefully sanitized, tended-to wounds can become scars.

"When the Pawn…" may better be regarded as a pre-breakup album; by all accounts, Fiona Apple was still living with her long-term boyfriend, director Paul Thomas Anderson, until after its release. But that timeline only makes the content more intriguing.

Apple, only in her early '20s at the time, is credited as the sole songwriter on all 10 tracks. Today, they play as half-retort to sexist critics and backlash ("Here's another speech you wish I'd swallow") and half-prophecy about her love life ("The shame is manifest in my resistance to your love").

It feels like Apple tapped into a deeper, visceral pulse to make this album — a gut feeling that her life didn't fully fit, that she should run far away — but one that she wasn't ready to act on. Or, as Apple puts it in track six: "I've acquired quite a taste for a well-made mistake." Call it self-sabotage or a woman's intuition, but it makes for a deliciously indignant listen.

In "Fast As You Can," it sounds like Apple is baiting her lover to leave when she's really asking him to listen, to see her for who she really is, instead of a "pretty mouth" or a pet.

By "Get Gone," the penultimate track, Apple is making her discomfort even more explicit: "You got your game, made your shot / And you got away with a lot / But I'm not turned on," she sings. "So put away that meat you're selling."

Long before "gaslighting" became a buzzword and mental health was embraced as a serious topic for musicians, "When the Pawn…" examines how feeling flattened and misunderstood can dramatically warp a woman's psyche — even make her question her reality. "Paper Bag" is the paragon, witty and fuming: "He said, 'It's all in your head,'" Apple sings. "I said, 'So's everything,' but he didn't get it." Its music video was ironically directed by Anderson himself.

Decades later, Apple would tell The New Yorker about the pair's drug-addled dynamic and the cold, painful loneliness that defined her life at the time. She said she remembers thinking in 1998, "Fuck this, this is not a good relationship," though she was reluctant to say it publicly. Fans of "When the Pawn…" already had a hunch.

As Lorde admits in the closing track, she was a reckless, inflamed teenager when she wrote her sophomore album — roaming around New York City, figuring out how to be alone, and chasing a vision of "perfect places" that she ends up deciding does not exist.

The tracklist largely came together in the summer of 2016, shortly after Lorde split from her first serious boyfriend, photographer James Lowe. She has also said she was reeling from the recent deaths of her heroes, Prince and David Bowie, and sickened by the constant barrage of bad headlines and record-high temperatures.

"It sort of drove me insane," she wrote while annotating her lyrics on Genius. "I was walking around Midtown every day and felt like I was this close to ripping my clothes off or freaking out at a stranger."

All those formative, agonizing, skin-crawling sensations were compounded and crystallized into "Melodrama," which, despite Lorde's consistently brilliant output, remains her best work to date.

True to its title, the scope of "Melodrama" captures the way that being young and heartbroken feels like the end of the world — so every party is approached like it might be the last. Lorde's lyricism is a masterful blend of high and low brow, often dancing between esoteric and obvious, reflective and reactive.

Importantly, it never scans as arrogant because Lorde implicates herself as a member of, in her own words, the "loveless generation." She's not above any of it — the escapist drugs, the mind games, the ill-advised flings — but she's better at articulating their effects.

At first blush, Carole King's "Tapestry" may feel too warm and cozy to jive with a broken heart. Then, one day, you're listening to "It's Too Late" as you lay in bed all morning, wondering whether to bust loose from your perfectly fine relationship, and the weight of her songwriting clicks into place.

"Something inside has died / And I can't hide and I just can't fake it," King sings in the indelible chorus — though she sounds less like something has died and more like someone has been reborn.

Indeed, "Tapestry" is the sound of resolve and reinvention in the face of solitude and uncertainty, the sound of very sage advice. "You've got to get up every morning with a smile on your face / And show the world all the love in your heart," King sings in "Beautiful." This is not the standard mindset of a person who recently weathered a life-upending divorce, but that's the magic of King: When you listen to her music, you've got a friend.

Joni Mitchell's "Blue" has been cited as one of the greatest albums of all time so often that it hardly bears repeating.

"Blue" cemented Mitchell as a pioneer in the confessional school of songwriting. She authored the Laurel Canyon-era masterpiece during the tail-end of her relationship with Graham Nash (of Crosby, Stills & Nash) and in the aftermath of their breakup, when she began dating James Taylor. Naturally, Nash has said listening to "Blue" is "quite difficult for me personally."

"It brings back many memories and saddens me greatly," he wrote for Jeff Gold's 2012 book, "101 Essential Rock Records."

Nevertheless, even the apparent subject of eye-stingers like "My Old Man" ("But when he's gone / Me and them lonesome blues collide / The bed's too big / The frying pan's too wide") and "A Case of You" ("Just before our love got lost you said / 'I am as constant as a northern star' / And I said 'Constantly in the darkness'") can't resist the album's eloquent, hypnotic allure.

"'Blue' is, by far, my most favorite solo album," Nash wrote, "and the thought that I spent much time with this fine woman and genius of a writer is incredible to me."

The Beach Boys' magnum opus "Pet Sounds" masquerades in pop culture as a cheery, charming pop album — a reputation fostered by needle drops in cheery, charming movies, like "God Only Knows" in the ensemble Christmas classic "Love Actually" and "Wouldn't It Be Nice" in Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore's quirky rom-com "50 First Dates."

"Pet Sounds," however, is far more than the sum of its parts — and far more devastating than those scenes would imply.

Lead singer and songwriter Brian Wilson is credited as the album's mastermind. Just 23 years old at the time of its release, he was determined to push the band's creative and emotional limits, drawing inspiration from an unrequited teenage crush and the general malaise of innocence lost.

"Pet Sounds" opens with an existential quandary: "Wouldn't it be nice if we were older? / Then we wouldn't have to wait so long / And wouldn't it be nice to live together / In the kind of world where we belong?"

The notion is romantic, of course, but the phrasing betrays a sense of impending doom. It would be nice, Wilson implies, if only that kind of world were real.

The rest of the story unfolds as a tragedy with contrastingly bright percussion and sparkly guitars, as if the melodies, harmonies, and chords are all conspiring to disguise the grief at its core — the first stage, denial, at its finest. "You Still Believe In Me" reveals a narrator riddled with shame, grasping at thinning gestures of trust from his partner, while "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)" describes a moment that's both intimate and heavy with fear. "Let's not think about tomorrow," Wilson begs, delaying their moment of reckoning.

By the closing track, it seems his fear has come to pass: "Oh, Caroline, you break my heart," he moans. "I want to go and cry / It's so sad to watch a sweet thing die." The listener is left with the sound of dogs barking and a train whizzing by, an everyday emblem of missed opportunities.

Fellow musicians and critics alike have admired the album's dense, ambitious scope, which famously spurred The Beatles to make "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Many have argued that "Pet Sounds" pioneered what we now think of as "the modern pop album."

"Rumours" is the definitive breakup album — a prismatic display of heartbreak, where every composer has their own ax to grind.

The real-life drama that fueled "Rumours" has been thoroughly documented and even turned into fiction. As Mick Fleetwood, Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, and John McVie decamped to Florida in the mid-'70s to write their second album together, the bandmates' relationships became increasingly tangled.

Around this time, Nicks broke up with Buckingham after several years as a couple, though neither was happy with the decision. The McVies were going through a divorce while Christine began dating the band's lighting director, Curry Grant. Fleetwood was also divorcing his wife, Jenny Boyd; they remarried in 1977, the same year "Rumours" was released, but it wasn't long before Fleetwood and Nicks began having an affair. Everyone was writing songs to and about each other, and no one was trying to hide it.

The tracklist reflects every texture and shade of the band's entwined turmoil, from Christine's post-divorce stroke of clarity ("Don't Stop") and Buckingham's indignant kiss-off ("Go Your Own Way") to Nicks' eerie snapshot of rock stardom and its illusion-shattering vices ("Gold Dust Woman").

No fewer than three tracks also happen to be some of the greatest ever made: "Dreams," "The Chain," and, of course, "Silver Springs," an archetypal Nicks song that was cut from the album's standard edition and replaced by the poppier Nicks-Buckingham duet "I Don't Want to Know." When Fleetwood broke the news of the swap to Nicks, "I started to scream bloody murder," she told Rolling Stone.

As it turned out, "Silver Springs" was the final, key piece to secure the album's legacy — witchy, feminine rage distilled to its purest form. After Nicks delivered that famous unblinking performance of the song at a Fleetwood Mac reunion show, it was released as a live recording on 1997's "The Dance" and earned a Grammy nomination for best pop duo/group performance.

"Silver Springs" was eventually included on deluxe versions of "Rumours," becoming a cult favorite, a staple on the band's setlist, and fulfilling the author's fateful prophecy: "You'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you."

Read about the 50 best breakup songs of the 21st century and listen to the complete list on Spotify.