Hurts Like Hell, Toronto songwriter Charlotte Cornfield ’s March 27, 2026 Merge Records debut, is the most open-hearted, full-voiced album of her career and the first she’s recorded since the birth of her daughter in 2023. Decamping to Philip Weinrobe ’s Sugar Mountain studio in Brooklyn, New York in January 2025, Cornfield was joined by Palehound’s El Kempner (guitar/vocals), Lake Street Drive’s Bridget Kearney (bass/vocals), Adam Brisbin (guitar/pedal steel), and Sean Mullins (drums). She 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. These ten songs are at once a reaffirmation of Cornfield standing among the great singer-songwriters of her generation and the first articulation of her future, whatever uncertainty and love it may bring
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Music for sleeping and waking, walking and driving, hunting and fishing, for loitering outside a roadhouse on the haunted tundra. Okay in elevators, not great for dinner. On Caveman Wakes Up Friendship’s new album and second for Merge Records, the band’s historically capacious definition of country music grows wider still. Shambolic guitars are offset by flute pads, bleary poetry is set against a Motown rhythm section, a song about Jerry Garcia and First Lady Betty Ford fades out with a drum solo, like if Talk Talk came from a dingy Philadelphia basement, and was fronted by James Tate. Songwriter Dan Wriggins’ ragged baritone cuts through eleven murky, swirling country-rock songs with profound lyrical substance and sincerity. Like an alarm clock incorporated into the edge of a dream, Caveman Wakes Up belongs equally to the conscious and subconscious mind, fraught with background, steeped in reference and experimentation, delivered casually and as a dire warning, dedicated, above all, to music’s creative soul.
