In his song “Right Moves,” Josh Ritter sings about two far-flung lovers, driven apart by what he calls “the comedy of distance” and “the tragedy of separation.” These are two helpful categories for understanding romantic plight, but the songs of Julia Jacklin call for a third one—call it the peril of proximity. On her bruised and thorny album Crushing, the Australian singer and songwriter picks apart intimacy’s inevitable complications. For her characters, love is an act of entanglement, requiring the surrender of privacy, autonomy, and control. They get their toes stepped on, their personal space violated, their sense of identity eroded. Jacklin’s songs—most of them set either just before or just after a breakup—are all about what real vulnerability costs, and about how hard it is to ever fully extricate yourself from love’s briar patch. But while Crushing unfolds against a backdrop of romantic wreckage, it’s not exactly right to say that the album is a document of heartbreak; it’s more like a chronicle of attempted reclamation.

Then again, reclaiming the self isn’t always easy. Take it from the woman in “Body,” which opens the album with a slow burn and the dreadful sense of inevitability. The woman has just broken up with her boyfriend, and panics to remember that he has a compromising photo of her—something he could use to shame her. “Well, it’s just my life/ and it’s just my body,” Jacklin sighs, but the ominous implication is that these things aren’t completely hers at all, and perhaps never will be again; she’s given a piece of herself away and can’t take it back. But if familiarity makes it tough to sever ties, it can also make it painful to stay. “Don’t know how to keep loving you/ Now that I know you so well,” Jacklin sings later in the album. She’s distressed by a romance that’s settled into routine, and while disentanglement can seem wrenching, devotion may be harder still.

On Crushing, love isn’t just a matter of emotions but of flesh and bone and physical space. Sometimes, that’s burdensome. In “Head Alone,” Jacklin sings about wanting to be loved in ways that aren’t just carnal, to have a reprieve from infatuation’s fumbling hands; “I don’t wanna be touched all the time,” she sings. “I raised my body up to be mine.” That word body comes up repeatedly—11 times in the first two songs, Lindsay Zoladz calculates—and more often than not it represents the tension between ceding your autonomy to someone else and claiming ownership of something that’s yours alone. The woman in “Pressure to Party” is urged to hit the club and dance her broken heart away, but she’s not ready; she doesn’t have her “body back,” she says, an alien in her own skin. That same phrase shows up elsewhere, when Jacklin sings that she’s “headed to the city to get her body back,” as if embarking on a holy pilgrimage to rediscover her independent, unentangled self.

Given the incarnational slant of Jacklin’s writing, it’s only fitting that the sound of Crushing is delicate, tactile, physical. Working with producer Burke Reid, she lends these songs clarity and warmth, to the point where you can hear the piano bench creaking in the whispered reverie of “When the Family Flies In,” and the rustling hum of acoustic guitar strings in “Convention.” A few songs work up a rickety rock and roll energy: “Pressure to Party” jangles and pulses with the DIY clatter of 80s college rock, while “Head Alone” chimes and surges like something Lucy Dacus and her boygenius troupe might conceive. “Don’t Know How to Keep Loving You,” the album’s simmering fulcrum, sticks to the low embers of the blues, complete with a grinding electric guitar solo. Though Jacklin’s songs occasionally reach brisk tempos, most unfold slowly and steadily. This, too, feels fitting: These songs bear witness to how easily hearts and lives and bodies can be damaged, and Jacklin’s deliberateness suggests that she knows how important it is to handle delicate things with care.

Of course, even the most fastidious lovers can find their efforts come to ruin, but another parallel between Jacklin and Dacus is that they both seem less interested in cataloging heartbreak then in considering post-heartbreak narratives. “I’m not a good woman when you’re around,” says the character in “Body,” seizing romantic dissolution as a chance to regain her true identity.  Yet in “Good Guy,” Jacklin gives voice to the corruptor: “I don’t care for the truth when I’m lonely,” she admits, and then assures her partner that he’s “still a good guy,” no matter the compromised circumstances of their union. She’s granting him permission to tell a certain story about himself, no matter how much or how little his actions bear it out. Entering into love’s entanglement means allowing yourself to be changed, your sense of self blurred—which means extrication can offer a blank slate. “Who will I be, now that you’re no longer next to me?” Jacklin wonders in “Don’t Know How to Keep Loving You,” as if hitting her own reset button following a romantic dead end. But the blank slate gives and it takes away. In the haunted closer, “Comfort,” Jacklin hopes the best for an ex-paramour, and wishes she could tell him everything’s going to be okay. “But that’s what you get,” she says to herself. “You can’t be the one to hold him when you were the one who left.” Now unentangled, she can have her body and her self back; she can be who she wants to be. But at what cost?