Hurts Like Hell, Charlotte Cornfield’s 2026 Merge Records debut, is Cornfield’s sixth album. It is 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.