Sympathy is a knife, and Taylor Swift has none of it. Swift’s album The Life of a Showgirl came out October 3, and smack-dab in the middle of the 12-song album comes “Actually Romantic.” “Actually Romantic” doesn’t mention anyone by name, but it’s a clear sideswipe at a certain singer who’s friends with one of her exes, has a predilection for coke, and wrote her a song. It’s true: In the year of our Lord 2025, Taylor Swift dropped a diss track about Charli XCX.
“I heard you call me ‘boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got your brain,” Swift opens the track. “High-fived my ex and then you said you’re glad he ghosted me.” In just a few lines, Swift calls Charli out for being mean to her during their overlap dating Matty Healy and George Daniel of the 1975 and for supporting Healy (who’s now engaged to Charli’s friend Gabriette) when he ghosted her. “Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face / Some might be offended / But it’s actually romantic,” she follows it up. The Charli song that Swift is referring to is “Sympathy is a knife,” which came out last year on Charli’s landmark album, Brat. Set during their aforementioned overlap, it chronicles Charli’s unwarranted jealousy. In Swift’s response, it doesn’t hurt Taylor Swift that Charli XCX thinks she’s “tacky” — instead, it makes her “wet.”
“Sympathy is a knife” is not really a diss track in the classical sense — it’s about Charli knowing she’s having unreasonable feelings when confronted by a more successful artist on what she thought was her turf. But on “Actually Romantic,” Swift is pretty offended by it anyway and has no such time for analyzing her feelings about Charli beyond her claimed lack of them. “I know you think it comes off vicious but it’s precious, adorable / Like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse / That’s how much it hurts,” Swift sings instead. Undoubtedly a good line, but it does mischaracterize “Sympathy” — if that song is vicious to anyone, it’s to Charli herself.
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Still, there’s personal narratives we don’t fully understand at play here. Swift may sing that she hadn’t thought about Charli “in a long time,” but the pop stars have a lengthy history. Their first time performing together was in 2015, on Swift’s 1989 World Tour, when Charli was a surprise guest in Toronto. Then Charli was an opener alongside Camilla Cabello on the Reputation World Tour in 2018. In a 2019 interview with Pitchfork, Charli said, “I’m really grateful that [Taylor] asked me on that tour,” but added that “as an artist, it kind of felt like I was getting up on stage and waving to 5-year-olds.” She later clarified that comment in a tweet, saying, “Leading up to that tour I’d been playing a tonne of 18+ club shows and so to be on a stage in front of all ages was new to me and made me approach my performances with a whole new kind of energy … There is absolutely no shade and only love here!”
Swift didn’t publicly acknowledge Charli again until after Brat came out. “I’ve been blown away by Charli’s melodic sensibilities since I first heard ‘Stay Away’ in 2011,” Swift told New York in a profile of Charli. “Her writing is surreal and inventive, always. She just takes a song to places you wouldn’t expect it to go, and she’s been doing it consistently for over a decade. I love to see hard work like that pay off.” Now she’s singing a different tune. Maybe these two can work it out on the remix.
