Charlotte Cornfield - Hurts Like Hell
Merge Records
Released on March 27th, 2026
I was first introduced to Charlotte Cornfield through her 2019 album The Shape of Your Name. About halfway through that record, I was struck down by the astounding “Silver Civic,” possibly the greatest love song ever written. If Taylor Swift had penned it, just about everyone on the planet would be able to sing along to its catchy chorus. I have since devoured her earlier repertoire and have eagerly anticipated every new release, which brings me to Hurts Like Hell, the superb new album from one of Canada’s best songwriters.
Hurts Like Hell is Cornfield’s first project since the birth of her daughter in 2023, and that life-changing experience is felt all over the record. She sings of love and loss, familiar territory for the songwriter, and themes that are so tried-and-true they are often considered clichés. What has always distinguished Charlotte Cornfield from her contemporaries, however, is that she doesn’t rely on clichés. Her songs have quirky turns of phrase and are cultivated from living: from people-watching, bar-hopping, dating, and going to shows when she’s not playing shows herself. While a lot of her material often feels personal and self-focused, there is a shift in perspective on this newest offering. There is still a lot of Cornfield’s personal voice in here, but the songs are also populated with other characters - former lovers, heroes, and friends. Friends like Destiny, whom I can’t decide is an actual friend or the personification of Destiny itself, as she accompanies Cornfield throughout the album. At one point, as Cornfield reflects on her musical career on “Long Game,” she is lying on Destiny’s couch, “throwing down about love.”
Throwing down about love is where Charlotte Cornfield shines. Lead singles “Hurts Like Hell” and “Living With It” are painful and beautiful love songs featuring more new characters in the form of collaborators. Buck Meek of Big Thief fame and Canadian musical royalty Feist sing backup vocals on each track, respectively. The title track is surprisingly light and celebratory despite its name. With a country flair and sing-along chorus, Cornfield and Meek seem to be acknowledging that life is full of pain but decide to sing and dance in the face of it. The duet featuring Feist is a gut-wrenching highlight of the album. The song’s narrator appears to be having an internal conversation, and Feist’s vocals serve as an inner voice. It isn’t a call-and-response, reciprocal dialogue; rather, her harmonies serve as another amplifying reminder, telling the character something she already knows - she's afraid. Afraid of deciding to either keep a relationship going or to “throw it all away.”
Cornfield goes beyond love song crooning to show us that she’s no one-trick pony. “Lost Leader” is a poignant and funny song that tells the tale of a former band frontman who has lost some of his lustre. He is characterized as someone who drinks too much, argues with people half his age, and only attracts dudes to his shows. It’s unclear whether the titular lost leader has actually changed as a person or whether Cornfield’s narrator is the one who has matured and now sees their former hero in a new light and as something of a loser. Cornfield paints a brilliant, yet pathetic picture of someone who once had a claim to fame but is now a sad shadow of their former self.
This peculiar style of songwriting continues on the song “Squiddd,” a semi-fictional story about a band that played just one show. The character of Destiny shows up again to guide the narrator to the Squiddd show just as they were about to call it a night. The vivid imagery of the lead singer performing with “part of the mic cable curled in [their] hand” mesmerizes the song’s narrator, as does the band’s lyric “I want to share files with you.” Brilliantly, the line ends up metafictionally being the chorus of “Squidd.” It is an odd turn of phrase and off-putting at first, but Cornfield manages to imbue so much nostalgia, longing and emotion into what should be a silly song. It pulls the listener into one of those nights when you think nothing is going to happen, but you serendipitously end up catching the only performance of a band and have their lyrics rolling around in your head for days after. Ironically, like the song that inspired it, “Squiddd” is the track that has stuck with me most and “I want to share files with you” is echoing in my head right now.
The press release for the album claims Hurts Like Hell is part Nashville Skyline and Harvest, and while I agree with this comparison, I also find that it, at times, veers into the vulnerable fragility of Tonight’s the Night. Producer Phil Weinrobe encouraged Cornfield to bump the keys of the songs up, and she says that had her “entering into a different zone emotionally, pushing the words to the front in a different way.” Like Neil Young’s strained vocals on “Mellow My Mind” and “Tired Eyes,” you can hear Cornfield straining on some of these tunes. This never becomes a distraction, though; instead, it adds to the emotional weight of the lyrics. All of these songs deal with the pains of life, all the moments that hurt like hell, and the listener can feel Cornfield’s pain, aided by the decision to push her vocals into a higher register. As she laments past relationships, her voice is shaky and delicate, pushing into new territory, serving as a nice metaphor for someone grappling with the new responsibility of motherhood.
I have heard musicians say that making and releasing a record is like having a child. It feels like a part of you. It gestates within you and is eventually released into the world to fend for itself. Raising a child also often takes a village, and this is clearly the case with Cornfield’s new musical offspring. She and her band recorded together in the room, with live vocals, minimal overdubs, and no headphones. The result is a warm and organic sound. Like new parents, the musical accompaniment embraces Cornfield’s songs in gentle and capable hands. On the songs “Before” and “Bloody and Alive,” the guitar swells, and the ambiance sometimes takes on an ethereal quality not unlike what a baby in utero might hear.
Hurts Like Hell is another shining example that Charlotte Cornfield is a national treasure. She can pen a love song to rival the greatest, and her peculiar eye for odd details makes her one of the most original songwriting voices working today. Cornfield’s foray into motherhood has gifted her with wisdom and a new, less self-focused perspective that comes through in her lyrics. This doesn’t make her come across as pretentious or dogmatic, though, and she still impresses upon the listener that she’s one of us. She is still tumbling through life, feeling all the bruises that are left behind. She is still hurting like hell, but these songs offer a resilient hope for the future. She sings in “Lucky” that “maybe lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same life, but I feel lucky.” Her gratitude for life is obvious. She has made an album with her dream collaborators, has brought a child into the world and is continuing to hone her craft as a masterful songwriter. She’s lucky, and we’re lucky to have her.