Sometimes you don’t need to feel better. Sometimes you need to feel everything — loudly, messily, completely. These 10 songs were made for exactly that.
There’s a particular kind of cry that doesn’t ask permission. It starts somewhere behind your sternum, rises without warning, and by the time it reaches your face, it’s already too late for dignity. We call it the ugly cry. And unlike the polite, cinematic kind, this one requires the right soundtrack.
Whether you’ve lost someone, ended something you loved, or simply carried too much for too long, the songs below understand. Queue them up, dim the lights, and let it out.
The List of Songs to Ugly Cry
1. “When the Party’s Over” — Billie Eilish (2018)
Album: don’t smile at me EP | Genre: Indie Pop / Dark Pop
Few songs capture the anguish of loving someone while knowing it’s destroying you quite like this one. Eilish recorded it in near-whisper, the vocal so close and intimate it feels like she’s sitting across from you in the dark. The restraint of the production — almost nothing but her voice — is what makes it devastating. There’s nowhere to hide in a song this sparse.
Billie co-wrote it with her brother Finneas at just 16 years old, which makes the emotional maturity of the performance even more striking. It’s not a breakup song exactly — it’s something more specific and more painful than that. It’s a song about staying in something that is quietly taking pieces of you, and choosing to stay anyway.
You’ll be fine through the whole thing, and then the harmonies stack in the final chorus and dissolve into nothing — and something in your chest goes with them before you even realize you’re crying.
2. “The Night Will Always Win” — Manchester Orchestra (2014)
Album: Cope | Genre: Alternative Rock / Post-Hardcore
This one builds slowly and then breaks open with a ferocity that catches you off guard. Andy Hull’s voice is a raw instrument — not technically perfect, but emotionally exact. The song explores despair and the feeling of being swallowed by darkness, and it does so with the kind of musical architecture that makes the emotional release feel earned rather than manipulative.
Manchester Orchestra has always written about the weight of being alive with unusual honesty, and this track sits at the peak of that impulse. The song was written during a period when Hull was wrestling with themes of faith, doubt, and emotional exhaustion — and every one of those struggles is audible. It doesn’t romanticize darkness. It just refuses to look away from it.
The final two minutes don’t warn you. The song just stops reasoning with you and starts howling, and your body responds before your brain can argue against it.
3. “Fast Car” — Tracy Chapman (1988)
Album: Tracy Chapman | Genre: Folk / Soft Rock
One of the greatest songs ever written about the hope that doesn’t quite come true. Tracy Chapman’s voice carries decades of weariness even when she was young, and the story she tells — two people trying to outrun their circumstances — lands differently at every stage of life. It’s the specificity of the details that destroys you: the checkout girl, the shelter, the father who drinks.
Chapman wrote this song in her early twenties, drawing on her own experience growing up in poverty in Cleveland, Ohio. The narrator isn’t asking for much — just a chance, just movement, just something different from what came before. The tragedy of the song is that the wanting is so reasonable and the getting is so hard. Luke Combs brought it back to number one in 2023, introducing it to a new generation — proof that a song this true doesn’t age.
It’s the opening line that gets you — this enormous want compressed into something so plain and so specific that it stops feeling like a song and starts feeling like something you once said out loud in a car and then immediately pretended you didn’t.
4. “Liability” — Lorde (2017)
Album: Melodrama | Genre: Indie Pop / Art Pop
Written during a period of genuine isolation, Lorde stripped everything back to just voice and piano for this one. It’s about being “too much” for people — too intense, too sad, too needy — and learning to be your own company. For anyone who has ever felt like the person who gets left, this song is a mirror held at an uncomfortable angle.
Melodrama as an album is a masterwork of emotional specificity, and “Liability” is its rawest moment. Lorde has spoken about writing it after a relationship ended partly because of the intensity of her public life and inner world — the feeling of being loved until you became inconvenient. What makes it extraordinary is the turn it takes in the final section, where self-pity quietly becomes self-possession. It doesn’t fix anything. But it changes the angle.
There’s a line in the second verse about being disposable that will find the exact part of you that has ever felt like too much for someone — and it will sit there, accurate and merciless, until something breaks.
5. “Let Her Go” — Passenger (2012)
Album: All the Little Lights | Genre: Folk Pop / Acoustic
The central paradox of this song — that you only miss what you had once it’s gone — is not a new observation, but Passenger delivers it with such plain-spoken sincerity that it hits anyway. The acoustic simplicity keeps the focus entirely on the lyric, and the lyric has nowhere to hide.
British singer-songwriter Mike Rosenberg wrote this during a period of extensive solo touring, playing to small crowds in coffee shops and on street corners. There’s a loneliness baked into that origin story that the song carries with it. It became a global hit almost accidentally — a slow-building word-of-mouth phenomenon that proved people were hungry for something this unguarded. The production never tries to be more than what it is: one voice, one guitar, one feeling stated as plainly as possible.
Somewhere in the second verse the details get so specific that the song stops being about a stranger and starts being about something you lost and haven’t fully admitted to missing yet.
6. “Skinny Love” — Bon Iver (2008)
Album: For Emma, Forever Ago | Genre: Indie Folk / Lo-Fi
Recorded in a Wisconsin cabin during a brutal winter, For Emma, Forever Ago sounds like it was made in the aftermath of something catastrophic — because it was. “Skinny Love” opens the emotional floodgates of that record with a performance of such fractured intensity that Justin Vernon’s voice cracks in places that feel less like imperfection and more like the point entirely.
Vernon retreated to his father’s hunting cabin after a relationship ended and his band dissolved, spending three months largely alone with a recorder and whatever he was feeling. “Skinny Love” — a relationship running on fumes, surviving on almost nothing — came out of that isolation. The lo-fi recording quality isn’t a limitation; it’s the texture of the emotion itself. Birdy’s 2011 cover brought it to millions of new listeners, but the original remains untouchable in its rawness.
The song doesn’t end so much as fall apart — and the falling apart is the whole point. You’ll feel it in your jaw first, that telltale tightening, right before it becomes something else entirely.
7. “Fix You” — Coldplay (2005)
Album: X&Y | Genre: Alternative Rock / Post-Britpop
This song was written by Chris Martin for his then-wife Gwyneth Paltrow after the death of her father. That origin story matters because it’s audible — the first half is quiet and searching, the second half erupts into something that wants desperately to make things better and knows it can’t. The gap between those two impulses is where most of the grief lives.
The organ that opens the track was played on an old instrument Martin found in Paltrow’s father’s house — which means the sound of the song is literally made from something that belonged to the person being grieved. That detail changes the listening experience once you know it. The helplessness in the lyrics isn’t poetic posturing; it’s the honest condition of someone who loves another person and cannot do the one thing they most want to do.
The song builds so gradually you almost don’t notice it happening — and then the guitar lifts into the final chorus and something in the room changes. It’s the sound of someone trying very hard to fix what they can’t fix, and you feel that in a way that’s difficult to explain and impossible to ignore.
8. “The Night We Met” — Lord Huron (2015)
Album: Strange Trails | Genre: Indie Folk / Dream Pop
This song acquired a second life after appearing in 13 Reasons Why, but it existed as a masterwork of longing before that. The narrator wants to go back to a single moment before everything went wrong — a feeling so universal it barely needs elaboration. The vintage production gives it a quality of something heard through time, which only deepens the ache.
Ben Schneider wrote the song with a very specific sonic vision — it was meant to sound like something discovered on an old record, slightly worn, slightly distant, as if the memory itself is degrading. That production choice is inseparable from the emotional content. Wanting to return to a moment is one thing; the song makes you feel the impossibility of that return in its very texture. The fact that it became the emotional centerpiece of a show about grief and loss wasn’t an accident — it was the right song finding the right moment.
It’s the kind of song that finds you mid-drive at 2 AM, and suddenly you’re pulled over on the side of the road not entirely sure why — except that you needed to not be moving for a minute.
9. “Hurt” — Johnny Cash (2002)
Album: American IV: The Man Comes Around | Genre: Country / Alternative
Trent Reznor wrote this song for Nine Inch Nails. Johnny Cash, in his final years, turned it into something else entirely — a meditation on a life lived hard and the people left wounded along the way. The music video, shot when Cash was visibly aging and in poor health, is inseparable from the song now. Reznor himself said it no longer felt like his.
Cash recorded this as part of his American series with producer Rick Rubin — a late-career project that stripped him down to his essentials and let the weight of his biography do what no production embellishment could. He was 70 years old when he recorded it. His wife June Carter Cash, who appears in the music video, died four months after it was filmed. Cash followed her four months after that. None of that was known when the video was released, but all of it feels present in every frame regardless.
Watch the music video once and you’ll never hear the song the same way again. The weight of everything he’d lived — the damage, the love, the survival — sits in every frame. By the time it’s over, you won’t be entirely sure what you’re crying about. That’s the point.
10. “Superstar” — Sheryl Crow (Signature Tour Edition)
Original Album: Carpenters | Genre: Soft Rock / Dream Pop
Originally written in 1969 and made famous by The Carpenters, this song has been reimagined by artists across decades — most hauntingly by Sonic Youth, whose distorted, fading version strips the longing down to something almost unbearable. At its core, it’s about loving someone who doesn’t know you exist — the purest, most helpless kind of longing. Stripped to its essentials, it’s barely a song at all. It’s a feeling with a melody.
Karen Carpenter’s original performance is devastating in its own right — her voice so warm and controlled, delivering words of such naked longing that the contrast alone is enough to break you. Sonic Youth’s 1994 cover goes the other direction entirely: rough, degraded, the guitar fading out like a signal lost over distance. Both versions understand something essential about the song — that this kind of love doesn’t ask for anything back. It can’t. That’s what makes it the saddest feeling in the world.
It’s almost embarrassing, how cleanly this song finds the part of you that has loved someone from a distance and said nothing. The want is so simple and so enormous at the same time that you don’t know whether to laugh at yourself or just let it out.
The ugly cry isn’t weakness. It’s the body doing exactly what it was designed to do: process, release, and make room for what comes next. These 10 songs will help you get there.
