Album Review: Charlotte Cornfield — “Hurts Like Hell”

Photo Credit: Colin Medley

Review by Ava Wiseley

Canadian singer-songwriter Charlotte Cornfield is back with her sixth album, “Hurts Like Hell.”

Although she’s been releasing music — which is best described as folk with hints of country — since 2011, her recent contributions to the indie music scene feel fresh. 

On this new record, her signature narrative songwriting style is as vivid as ever. She offers detailed descriptions about various events in her life — she names the neighborhoods, streets, and bars where they take place, and she introduces friends and other characters who play a role.

But the specificity of her lyrics doesn’t take away from their relatability. Instead, their personal, diaristic quality solidifies her as one of this era’s best musical storytellers.

The sparse opening track, “Before,” sets up the theme of the record with a repeating lyric at the end of the song: “Real love, no fantasy.” Across the album, Cornfield sings about love in all its forms — sometimes beautiful, sometimes complicated, but always real and human.

Next is the lead single and title track, which explores feelings of hesitation when getting into a relationship. Without a doubt, it’s the catchiest and most upbeat on the record.

Cornfield’s knack for storytelling first appears in the bridge of this tune, in which she describes a man confessing to a potential lover on their porch. And in the chorus, we meet a friend named Karen who gives listeners wise advice: “You can’t make it if you never even try.” 

“Hurts Like Hell” is followed by “Lost Leader,” one of the album’s strongest songs. Over a slower but memorable melody, Cornfield writes in second person about a party that spirals into an awkward, drunken night. It’s full of relatable, human feelings like, “These aren’t your friends / They’re just people who know who you are” and “You said so many things tonight / Maybe you just shouldn’t speak.”

While the lyrics are the focal point of the album, the production — done by Phillip Weinrobe, who has worked with artists like Adrianne Lenker, Florist, Billie Marten, and Tomberlin — is worth mentioning, too.

Acoustic and electric guitars — the latter usually having a tremolo effect — appear throughout the album, along with piano, soft drums, and plucky bass. Pedal steel guitar is heavily featured.

Cornfield’s vocals are also backed by several prominent contemporary folk artists, including Buck Meek and Christian Lee Hutson.

And Feist, a Canadian indie pop singer-songwriter and member of the band Broken Social Scene, is featured on “Living With It.” Similar to “Hurts Like Hell,” this catchy tune is about uncertainty within relationships. Cornfield sings, “Telling you to go when I want you to stay / Maybe I’m gettin’ in my own way.”

On slow jam “Squiddd,” she meets someone in a bar and is mesmerized by a song their band plays, which contains the lyric “I wanna share files with you.” Although Cornfield technically didn’t write the lyric, her decision to make it the chorus of the song was a great one. Sharing “files” with a partner is a mundane act, but it’s also sweet because it reflects a life built together.

Cornfield’s laid-back singing style already sounds adjacent to that of Courtney Barnett, but when she talk-sings on the bridge of “Squiddd,” that similarity is ever more apparent.

Another song on which she sounds a bit like one of her contemporaries is “Kitchen.” Sonically, it’s a lot like “Big Deal” from Lucy Dacus’s 2025 album, “Forever Is A Feeling.” It shares the same theme as that album, too — love often takes a while to form between two people, but when it finally does, it can feel like it’s been there all along. Cornfield has a three-year-old daughter, and this tune tells the story of meeting her partner and being pregnant.

“Kitchen” also calls back to the repeated line at the end of “Before,” which was “Real love, no fantasy.” However, on this one, she describes her relationship as “Grounded and factual / Passionate and actual.”

Finally, on the slow closer “Bloody and Alive,” across which piano keys and guitars meander, Cornfield describes being in the hospital with her partner and having just given birth. This song arguably calls back to the opening track, too — perhaps the “before” was her time pre-parenthood. 

Ultimately, “Hurts Like Hell” proves that Cornfield is continuing to grow as a songwriter. Sometimes artists put out a great record early on in their career only for the quality of their work to falter as time goes on, but it’s clear she has avoided that fate. And not by a small margin, either. By telling vivid, touching, and even amusing stories on “Hurts Like Hell,” Cornfield displays her profound understanding of all the minute details that make up the human condition.