Hurts Like Hell
About this Album
Hurts Like Hell is Charlotte Cornfield's sixth studio album, released March 27, 2026, and her debut for Merge Records (issued in Canada through Next Door Records).
It is her first album made since becoming a parent in 2023, a shift that pulled her from a largely solitary songwriting process toward a communal one: the record was cut live in a room with producer Phil Weinrobe alongside collaborators including Feist, Buck Meek, Maia Friedman, El Kempner, and Bridget Kearney.
The ten-track album traces an arc from “Before,” a meditation on life prior to a relationship, through the title track's study of two wary people learning to trust again, to the closing “Bloody and Alive,” which captures the moment Cornfield first held her newborn daughter. It incorporates new pedal steel and country-inflected textures alongside her folk-rock foundation, and was shortlisted for the 2026 Polaris Music Prize, with the title track separately shortlisted for the SOCAN Polaris Song Prize.