8/10

Breakup records have a tendency to sit in the wreckage, but Eva Rose’s 'The Last Laugh' is far more interested in what happens once you stop staring at it.

Across thirteen vibrant tracks, the LA alt-pop artist turns heartbreak into something sharp, melodic and surprisingly energising, balancing fuzzy guitars and confessional writing with enough humour to keep the record from becoming weighed down by its subject. The result is a debut album that understands sadness without allowing it to dictate the entire mood.

Standout ‘Next Girl’ delivers one of the album’s more cutting moments, addressing an ex’s new partner with the kind of honesty that sits somewhere between warning, frustration and self-preservation. ‘All Your Friends’, meanwhile, takes the strange satisfaction of learning that an ex’s social circle still misses you and pushes it into bigger, chant-ready territory.

While ‘Scaring Everyone’ plays with the increasingly elaborate stories people invent around a new crush, finding comedy in emotional overthinking, before ‘Give Me A Good Reason’ takes a more restrained approach in its acceptance that relationships don't always end because somebody has done something unforgivable. Sometimes people simply move in different directions.

But most importantly, 'The Last Laugh' never treats recovery as a clean or particularly dignified process. There are grudges, awkward encounters, irrational thoughts and moments of genuine clarity sitting alongside one another. But it's that messiness that gives the record its warmth.

With her debut full-length, Eva Rose takes one of pop music’s most familiar subjects and gives it a welcome sense of momentum. 'The Last Laugh' is not about pretending heartbreak didn't hurt; it's about reaching the point where it no longer gets to tell the whole story.