Hurts Like Hell

Hurts Like Hell is Charlotte Cornfield’s sixth album, the first she’s recorded since the birth of her daughter, 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.” Hurts Like Hell is the most open-hearted, full-voiced album of her career, and also her most collaborative. Decamping to Philip Weinrobe’s Sugar Mountain studio in Brooklyn, Cornfield was joined by a full backing band, including Palehound’s El Kempner, Lake Street Dive’s Bridget Kearney, Adam Brisbin, and Sean Mullins, with key contributions by Núria Graham, and Daniel Pencer. Cornfield then recruited Feist, Buck