Olivia Rodrigo's 'Sour' finds all the right words to paint a universal portrait of heartbreak. This is why it's Insider's album of the year.

• Olivia Rodrigo's debut album "Sour" has been named Insider's album of the year.

• Rodrigo embraces messy emotions in her songwriting, which creates a cathartic listening experience.

• "Sour" serves as a reminder to nurture your sense of self and to stay tender in the face of pain.

Music criticism has always been, and will always be, a subjective practice. We tend to love songs and albums because of how they make us feel, not for any logical or easily explicable reason.

Paradoxically, that's exactly why I feel so confident about naming Olivia Rodrigo's "Sour" the defining album of 2021. It doesn't just make me feel things, but everything — all at once without a hint of shame.

And I'm not alone in having that experience, either.

Rodrigo crashed onto mainstream radars when the year had barely begun. She released her debut single "Drivers License" on January 8, which immediately debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The song doubled as a karaoke-primed power ballad and a vivid vignette of first heartbreak. Falling in love is scary enough, but for the young and thin-skinned, it's a greater mystery what happens in the wake: the unwrapping of limbs, the unknowing of secrets.

For her debut album, released four months later in May, Rodrigo drove even deeper into that maze. Written almost entirely by the teenager herself and her producer Dan Nigro, "Sour" is a practice in finding the right words to explain big, uncomfortable, amorphous feelings — a tall order considering, for most of us, it's hard to find any coherent words at all.

Of course, teen girls have historically been criticized for having big feelings, condescendingly described as sensitive and dramatic.

But in reality, a lot of people decide every day to zip up and present their best approximation of composure to the world, before going home and quietly watering their obsessions in a corner. Plenty of us have so many whims and aches, we haven't the faintest idea how to begin mapping them.

Rodrigo has learned how to negotiate that emotional minefield before graduating high school.

Throughout "Sour," she confronts her obsessions proudly, cataloging each with warlike precision. She distills heartbreak into pure, punchy phrases that are so perfect, I almost get annoyed that I never thought to say it like that (it is brutal out here).

Best of all, Rodrigo is unabashed about the several ugly paths that unrequited love has led her down: she embraces selfishness in "Happier," wrestles with guilt in "Favorite Crime," unleashes rage and spite in "Good 4 U."

"Oh God, I sound crazy," she moans in "Jealousy, Jealousy," but she doesn't. She sounds honest.

Indeed, Rodrigo writes about personal experiences, but her music speaks to universal impulses. Her songs offer validation to people who never quite learned to polish them — who occasionally feel the itch to tear things apart and howl and escape into the wilderness.

After more than a year defined by sickness and grief, when it became frighteningly easy to go numb to it all, "Sour" arrived in all its messy glory. When Rodrigo cries and pouts and mourns with melodic finesse, she gives us permission to do the same; to stay tender-hearted in the face of pain.

In "Enough For You," Rodrigo makes a simple request: "I don't want your sympathy, I just want myself back."

But by the end of the tracklist, she seems to realize there's no "old self" to resuscitate. There is only skin to shed and a new self to nurture.

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