There’s always need for some mental cutting, some specific scenery for despair and letting the heart bleed. Music helps you get in the feeling you want, when you heart is bleeding, when your heart is full of love, when happiness fills your day. Today I make my own personal list of heartbroken, desolated, windswept love songs for all those moments where a tear is not enough.

Stay tuned for a specific podcast regarding this beautiful and painful song list. And also for the top 10 happiest love songs, somewhere soon. Meanwhile, some of these might save your heart.

10. Kim Wilde, Cambodia

This is a little cheesy gem from the german pop artist. Truly heartbroken synthtetised loss, naive and easy but remarkably beautiful.

9. Noiserv, Bullets on Parade

Fellow Noiserv delivers some beautiful child pop for us, direct from his bedroom. Bullets on Parade is about a lot of confusing thoughts that come all at once and become less and less confusing. The song keeps growing and growing, becomes so hypnotic and sad that you almost cry for its purity. Just fucking beautiful. And I love the camera sound. It’s as gorgeous as it can get. It’s not directly about heartbreak or loss, but the feeling is so right.

8. Lhasa, De Cara a la Pared

Lhasa de Sela is beautiful. Every note from her voice is love. Her debut is all sung in Spanish and it’s truly remarkable. Cabaret and late night losses and gone lovers, sometimes aggressive and most of the times truly heartfelt. The opening song, De Cara a La Pared is devastating, takes you on a smooth ride between the veils of desperate love.

7. Brian Eno – By This River
(from The Son’s Room)

The master of sonic and synth landscapes can also be some heartbreaker. The Son’s Room deals with suicide, loss and painful memories. The room of the dead son is a personification of all things who are not right, a sanctuary of an almost evil entity. Moretti’s way of surpassing all these bad thoughts has it’s fuel in this song. It’s both utterly beautiful and utterly painful, overwhelming.

6. PJ Harvey, Who Will Love Me Now

(from The Passion of Darkly Noon)

The first time I saw The Passion of Darkly Noon it was really late at night and I wasn’t really sure I was awake. I was pretty sure I was dreaming, each sequence becoming more and more dream-like, as it reached its climax. I watched it in a trance. It blew my mind, but what truly woke me and kept me dreaming was the ending. Polly-Jean’s beautiful voice woke me up, as she sang “In the forest / there’s a monster / and he has done terrible things”. I can never dissociate the music from the film and the film from the music. It’s absolutely beautiful. It has an ethnic and noir vibe, so haunting. Just like the movie. Perfect.

5. Joy Division, Decades

Joy Division’s Ian Curtis is the absolute personification of a tortured soul, and its cult and legacy are overwhelming. Of all the songs, Decades stands as an immortal one. It’s the last song from their last album, Closer, and it’s an epic. Of course, Love Will Tear Us Appart and New Dawn Fades are equally heartbreaking, but Decades has nostalgia all over it.

4. Blonde Redhead, Messenger

Blonde Redhead’s music may be mostly about sadness in beautifully painful sonic landscapes, altogether in a faux-rock way. This wonderful trio delivers album after album some of the most beautiful songs in history of pop, and they stay as alternative as they can be. Their last effort, 23, is the most open and perhaps happiest record they created, yet, Messenger from Misery is a Butterfly stands out as one of my favorite heartbroken songs, so fragile so intimate and so delicate, it crawls into your skin like the blood that flows into your heart. Well, most of Blonde Redhead’s albums serve just as well this particular feeling, each of them particulary painful and truly beautiful, so I suggest you go digging for it – it will be a happy discovery. Here’s an interesting video rendition to the song, as there is no official video.

3. The Cure – Siamese Twins

The Cure’s Pornography is hailed as a desperate masterpiece, something so gothic and melancholic it hurts every chord. Every second of this record screams pain, loss and heartbreak. Siamese Twins perhaps better exemplifies this, a haunted tale of an unusual first time. Smith’s moaning lyrics and tortured singing are almost impossible to listen soberly. The Cure never got as desperate as this, the whole album is a personification of everything lost, of broken lifes and the end of it all. Still gives me the chills all this time.

2. Low, Shame

Paired with Red House Painters slow and narcotic desperation, Low’s music is deep and hypnotic, and incredibly and beautifully sad. Shame takes us to the corners of our broken hearts, it’s desolate and truly beautiful. There is a certain appeal to pain and loss that makes desperate love songs feel so intimate, and this is one of the best examples. Haunting.

1. Red House Painters, Katy Song

What’s to say about this utter desperation? Maybe Mark Kozelek is the personification of heartbreak, he is also capable of delivering some of the most melodic demonstrations of love, pain and loss. Katy Song’s 8 minute escalade of pain is a roller coaster, slow, deep, hipnotic. There’s nothing more beautiful as this, speaks from the heart straight into your own personal despair.