Video: The five best bands that broke up in 2011 -- paired with five of their saddest songs

​Bands break up all the time. This is an established fact, and depending upon how many of your favorite band's original members are alive, sane or producing concept albums, it can be a welcome one. The only difference this year is the purely unfair share of fallen rock soldiers that will have ended with it. The announcements of their demise came quickly and with a strange range on the surprise spectrum: Some of 2011's dead bands ended before their time (LCD Soundsystem), a lot of them ended after their time (R.E.M.), and some of them past even the point where they should be reasonably allowed to continue to exist (t.A.T.u.). Below, Backbeat put together the year's five hardest hits to the industry, accompanied by five songs to make you even sadder about your loss.

5. Rilo Kiley: Jenny Lewis' indie dream-pop outfit ended with a whimper via an "indefinite hiatus" most fans already called by its eventual name: Death. But in the thirteen years the group spent on repeat in dorm rooms and first apartments across the country, its legacy was cemented in a series of career-defining moves across the spectrum: from Saddle Creek to Warner Bros., from lovely to stunning, from small-town to sold-out. Although Under the Blacklight came with heavy accusations that the band had sold out, the L.A. quartet played graceful, brainy and sincere rock that wasn't afraid to show its seems. If you count Lewis' solo career separately from Jenny and Johnny, the band leaves a generous handful of side projects in its wake, though some of them are today on "hiatuses" of their own.