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CHARLOTTE CORNFIELD
Hurts Like Hell(Merge Records)
Add date: 3.31.2026
Release date: 3.27.2026
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Deep in the cut of Hurts Like Hell, Charlotte Cornfield’s March 27, 2026 Merge Records debut, lives “Squiddd,” a song about a fictional band that played one show, then broke up. They leave little behind, just the memory of that gig and one of their lyrics, the “I want to share files with you” of the song’s chorus, which has lived with Cornfield since she heard it at the one and only performance of a band called Crabbb, at a loft show in Montreal. It’s an arresting line, sung by Cornfield with hypnotic conviction, as if the whole heart of Hurts Like Hell was bound up in its sentiment.
In a way, it is. Hurts Like Hell is Cornfield’s sixth album, the first she’s recorded since the birth of her daughter in 2023, an inflection point for her as a person and an artist. The album’s recurrent themes of personal growth and renewal, of love’s perseverance through difficulty and shame and awkwardness, are rooted there. “That experience has pulled me out of myself and given me a different outlook on things,” she says. “The vulnerability and fragility and wildness of it all has made me less focused on self, more zoomed out.”
That change in perspective is evident not only in her approach to the lyric — which now gives voice to characters and themes beyond her own headspace — but in how she approached recording. Hurts Like Hell is the most open-hearted, full-voiced album of her career, and also her most collaborative effort to date. Decamping to Philip Weinrobe’s Sugar Mountain studio in Brooklyn, New York in January 2025, Cornfield was joined by a full backing band, including Palehound’s El Kempner (guitar/vocals), Lake Street Dive’s Bridget Kearney (bass/vocals), Adam Brisbin (guitar/pedal steel), and Sean Mullins (drums), with key contributions by Núria Graham (piano), and Daniel Pencer (saxophone). Cornfield and Weinrobe then recruited Feist, Buck Meek, Christian Lee Hutson and Maia Friedman to sing on the album. “Every musician involved was a dream collaborator,” Cornfield says.
Weinrobe (Adrienne Lenker, Buck Meek, Hand Habits), not only produced, recorded, and mixed Hurts Like Hell, but served as a sounding board for Cornfield while she was workshopping songs in the writing shed of The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman, a huge shift for a singer-songwriter whose working relationships with producers typically began on day one of recording. Those early exchanges laid the groundwork for a session that radically expanded her sound, each of Hurts Like Hell’s 10 tracks feeling like an answer to the question of how best to express a Charlotte Cornfield song. To find that answer, Cornfield and her band recorded together in the room, with live vocals, minimal overdubs, and no headphones, working organically and following their instincts.
The fruits of this process are immediately apparent on lead single “Hurts Like Hell,” a country-saturated yearner Cornfield calls “a shy people love story,” the band swelling to embrace Cornfield’s idiosyncratic flow as if to cradle her protagonist’s heart from self-doubt and shyness. Cornfield excels in the telling of these stories, in her attention to character and detail — “Hurts Like Hell” is no exception, but it started as an experiment in writing from a character’s perspective and not her own. That the song is so vulnerable, so lived-in, is a matter of trust between Cornfield and her bandmates, in each other and of their gut. Their sound lands somewhere between Nashville Skyline and Harvest; a warm, richly-textured response to her bruised-but-seeking call.
That call is itself a freshly honed tool. “One thing Phil encouraged me to do, which I really had not thought about before, was to bump the keys of the songs up so that I was singing higher,” she explains. “That meant entering into a different zone emotionally, pushing the words to the front in a different way.” That shift imbues narrative, story-driven songs like “Lost Leader,” a character study about a broken-down frontman, placing Cornfield’s narrator at the scene of an interaction between a musician and a fan not as a passive observer, but a tender documentarian of personal squalor and faded glory.
Much of Hurts Like Hell’s magic happens in the space Cornfield makes for harmony. Taken up by Meek (“Hurts Like Hell”) or Hutson (“Lost Leader”), characters are sung into life as if with a brushstroke. When she’s joined by Kempner or Kearney, it’s a dazzling facet of the natural, lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry of her band. On “Kitchen,” Friedman mirrors Cornfield’s sense of astonishment at finding herself in love, rendering the emotion at its ethereal peak. On “Living With It,” she’s joined by Feist, who Cornfield connected through a group chat for mothers who are touring musicians. “I had secretly dreamed of having her sing on the record and mentioned it to Phil, who she is also friends with,” she says. “When Phil reached out and she said yes, I sent her a few songs, hoping she would gravitate towards this one. She did, and she added her Feist magic to it, which is undeniable.” That magic meets Cornfield at her most vulnerable, just as she finds herself diving into the wreck of emotions beneath the surface of a painful memory, troubling its narrative and transfiguring the pain in Cornfield’s voice into something more complex and true, something that must have hurt like hell to have lived through, let alone to retell.
That it did, that life hurts like hell, is a source of strength for Cornfield, who has arrived at this album bearing both scars from her past and hope for the future. Standing outside of herself and taking stock of what she wanted her music to be in the wake of childbirth, she was brave enough to ask for space, for time, and for help from places and people familiar and unexpected — a group chat, songwriters she was fans of but wasn’t acquainted with, friends whose long-forgotten song leant her the chorus for a new one. Every “yes,” every voice memo, every shared file, every open door leading to this moment in Charlotte
Cornfield’s career. Call that moment what you will — an expansion, a rebirth, a breakthrough — Hurts Like Hell is big enough to meet it and has lost none of Cornfield’s charm, wit, or urgency in the offing, at once a reaffirmation of her standing among the great singer-songwriters of her generation and the first articulation of her future, whatever uncertainty and love it may bring.
Photo Credit: Colin Medley
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Merge
Official Website
Spotify
Tidal
YouTube
Deep in the cut of Hurts Like Hell, Charlotte Cornfield’s March 27, 2026 Merge Records debut, lives “Squiddd,” a song about a fictional band that played one show, then broke up. They leave little behind, just the memory of that gig and one of their lyrics, the “I want to share files with you” of the song’s chorus, which has lived with Cornfield since she heard it at the one and only performance of a band called Crabbb, at a loft show in Montreal. It’s an arresting line, sung by Cornfield with hypnotic conviction, as if the whole heart of Hurts Like Hell was bound up in its sentiment.
In a way, it is. Hurts Like Hell is Cornfield’s sixth album, the first she’s recorded since the birth of her daughter in 2023, an inflection point for her as a person and an artist. The album’s recurrent themes of personal growth and renewal, of love’s perseverance through difficulty and shame and awkwardness, are rooted there. “That experience has pulled me out of myself and given me a different outlook on things,” she says. “The vulnerability and fragility and wildness of it all has made me less focused on self, more zoomed out.”
That change in perspective is evident not only in her approach to the lyric — which now gives voice to characters and themes beyond her own headspace — but in how she approached recording. Hurts Like Hell is the most open-hearted, full-voiced album of her career, and also her most collaborative effort to date. Decamping to Philip Weinrobe’s Sugar Mountain studio in Brooklyn, New York in January 2025, Cornfield was joined by a full backing band, including Palehound’s El Kempner (guitar/vocals), Lake Street Dive’s Bridget Kearney (bass/vocals), Adam Brisbin (guitar/pedal steel), and Sean Mullins (drums), with key contributions by Núria Graham (piano), and Daniel Pencer (saxophone). Cornfield and Weinrobe then recruited Feist, Buck Meek, Christian Lee Hutson and Maia Friedman to sing on the album. “Every musician involved was a dream collaborator,” Cornfield says.
Weinrobe (Adrienne Lenker, Buck Meek, Hand Habits), not only produced, recorded, and mixed Hurts Like Hell, but served as a sounding board for Cornfield while she was workshopping songs in the writing shed of The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman, a huge shift for a singer-songwriter whose working relationships with producers typically began on day one of recording. Those early exchanges laid the groundwork for a session that radically expanded her sound, each of Hurts Like Hell’s 10 tracks feeling like an answer to the question of how best to express a Charlotte Cornfield song. To find that answer, Cornfield and her band recorded together in the room, with live vocals, minimal overdubs, and no headphones, working organically and following their instincts.
The fruits of this process are immediately apparent on lead single “Hurts Like Hell,” a country-saturated yearner Cornfield calls “a shy people love story,” the band swelling to embrace Cornfield’s idiosyncratic flow as if to cradle her protagonist’s heart from self-doubt and shyness. Cornfield excels in the telling of these stories, in her attention to character and detail — “Hurts Like Hell” is no exception, but it started as an experiment in writing from a character’s perspective and not her own. That the song is so vulnerable, so lived-in, is a matter of trust between Cornfield and her bandmates, in each other and of their gut. Their sound lands somewhere between Nashville Skyline and Harvest; a warm, richly-textured response to her bruised-but-seeking call.
That call is itself a freshly honed tool. “One thing Phil encouraged me to do, which I really had not thought about before, was to bump the keys of the songs up so that I was singing higher,” she explains. “That meant entering into a different zone emotionally, pushing the words to the front in a different way.” That shift imbues narrative, story-driven songs like “Lost Leader,” a character study about a broken-down frontman, placing Cornfield’s narrator at the scene of an interaction between a musician and a fan not as a passive observer, but a tender documentarian of personal squalor and faded glory.
Much of Hurts Like Hell’s magic happens in the space Cornfield makes for harmony. Taken up by Meek (“Hurts Like Hell”) or Hutson (“Lost Leader”), characters are sung into life as if with a brushstroke. When she’s joined by Kempner or Kearney, it’s a dazzling facet of the natural, lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry of her band. On “Kitchen,” Friedman mirrors Cornfield’s sense of astonishment at finding herself in love, rendering the emotion at its ethereal peak. On “Living With It,” she’s joined by Feist, who Cornfield connected through a group chat for mothers who are touring musicians. “I had secretly dreamed of having her sing on the record and mentioned it to Phil, who she is also friends with,” she says. “When Phil reached out and she said yes, I sent her a few songs, hoping she would gravitate towards this one. She did, and she added her Feist magic to it, which is undeniable.” That magic meets Cornfield at her most vulnerable, just as she finds herself diving into the wreck of emotions beneath the surface of a painful memory, troubling its narrative and transfiguring the pain in Cornfield’s voice into something more complex and true, something that must have hurt like hell to have lived through, let alone to retell.
That it did, that life hurts like hell, is a source of strength for Cornfield, who has arrived at this album bearing both scars from her past and hope for the future. Standing outside of herself and taking stock of what she wanted her music to be in the wake of childbirth, she was brave enough to ask for space, for time, and for help from places and people familiar and unexpected — a group chat, songwriters she was fans of but wasn’t acquainted with, friends whose long-forgotten song leant her the chorus for a new one. Every “yes,” every voice memo, every shared file, every open door leading to this moment in Charlotte
Cornfield’s career. Call that moment what you will — an expansion, a rebirth, a breakthrough — Hurts Like Hell is big enough to meet it and has lost none of Cornfield’s charm, wit, or urgency in the offing, at once a reaffirmation of her standing among the great singer-songwriters of her generation and the first articulation of her future, whatever uncertainty and love it may bring.
Photo Credit: Colin Medley