So your girlfriend cheated on you on your birthday, or your Semester at Sea ended and you had to leave the boy or girl you met in Paris. 2009 was a bummer for you. So get ready to relive those long drives in the car while you were on your way to see Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, this is your 2009 break up playlist.
1. Fever Ray – If I Had a Heart
This track was a dark trek into the black night of your soul. You didn’t even have a heart anymore. Also Fever Ray is super cool and would probably date you if she just met you.
2. Bon Iver – Woods
Nothing was more comforting than the thought that maybe you too could escape to the woods and create an amazing album loved by everybody, just like Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. But you probably just ate a pint of pistachio ice cream instead. Pretty much just as good.
3. Sunset Rubdown – Nightingale/December Song
Spencer Krug gets it, man. You two weren’t compatible because she was a vast explosion and you were the embers. Or something. At least it all sounded like it was about your breakup if you didn’t think about it too hard.
4. Charlotte Gainsbourg – Vanities
Charlotte Gainsbourg’s album was actually written by Beck, and this song sounds just like sad Beck, which is the best kind of Beck.
5. Antony and the Johnsons – Another World
Antony Hegarty’s trembling voice really captured your emotional fragility. Was he singing about environmental issues? Sure, but breakups are when you’re supposed to be self-absorbed. We forgive you.
6. Morrissey – Sorry Doesn’t Help
Morrissey, the eternally petulant teenager, understood your pain. Sometimes words just weren’t enough. Unless of course it was you leaving your ex thirty four angry voicemails.
7. Mono – Ashes in the Snow
Nobody does drama like Mono. Their swelling arrangements run the emotional gamut from plaintive longing to ecstatic catharsis. The perfect music to throw on when you told that new person you were trying to hook up with all about how unfair it was that your ex took so much of the vinyl collection that wasn’t even theirs.
8. Bonnie “Prince” Billy – You Can’t Hurt Me Now
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy sounds like he has been a heartbroken eighty year old folk singer his whole life. So yeah, he wasn’t judging you when you broke into your ex’s new place to take back that copy of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. It was your favorite book.
9. Thee Oh Sees – I Can’t Get No
This was just a short burst of angry fun. For those times when you couldn’t stand any more acoustic navel gazing.
10. St. Vincent – Laughing With A Mouth Of Blood
This slinky tune captured the feeling of intense alienation you felt when you realized that all of your friends were actually your ex’s friends.
11. Jay Reatard – Hang Them All
Jay Reatard served as an example of the limits of your myopic alcoholism and antisocial behavior post-breakup. As long as you stayed slightly more functional than him, your life was more or less okay. Except for the whole crushing loneliness thing.
12. Kings of Convenience – Renegade
Kings of Convenience have the stripped down acoustic melancholy thing down pat. A solid choice.
13. Dethklok – Laser Cannon Deth Sentence
The title of this song alone more or less encapsulated all you wanted for your ex after a breakup.
