Fans are convinced one song on Taylor Swift’s new album “The Life of a Showgirl” is a diss track about “Brat” Grammy winner Charli XCX. Here’s why.
First, to rewind: In 2024, XCX’s album “Brat” featured a song titled “Sympathy Is a Knife,” which many believe to be about Swift. In that song, XCX sings in the first verse, “I don’t wanna force a smile / This one girl taps my insecurities.” Later, in the second verse, XCX confesses, “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show / Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.”
XCX was dating her future husband, George Daniel, at the time she wrote “Sympathy Is a Knife,” who is the drummer and producer of The 1975. For a brief period in 2023, Swift dated The 1975 singer Matty Healy, which is why the leading theory is that the girl XCX didn’t want to see “backstage” at her boyfriend’s show was Swift and that she hoped Swift and Healy would break up quick.
(Spoiler alert: They did.)
Swift never acknowledged “Sympathy Is a Knife,” but there may be reason to now believe she was not happy about it, or, at least, XCX’s behavior regarding her and Healy’s relationship. On Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl,” there are lyrics in the album’s seventh track, titled “Actually Romantic,” which allude to XCX.
“I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave,” Swift sings at the start of the song, in a potential reference to XCX’s rumored drug use. “High-fived my ex and then you said you’re glad he ghosted me / Wrote me a song sayin’ it makes you sick to see my face,” Swift adds.
The latter lyric appears to be a clear nod to “Sympathy Is a Knife,” while the former seems to be a reference to XCX purportedly celebrating the downfall of Swift’s relationship with Healy. (In multiple songs on 2024’s “The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift implies that Healy informally ended their relationship by ghosting her altogether.)
The song’s title, “Actually Romantic,” is not only a clear reflection to its chorus, in which Swift cheekily portrays XCX’s references to her as flirting, but also one of the standout tracks on “Brat,” titled “Everything Is Romantic.” In the Spotify video that accompanies “Actually Romantic,” Swift can also be seen holding an apple, which may be yet another nod to a “Brat” song (titled, you guessed it, “Apple”).
XCX opened for Swift on her “Reputation” stadium tour in 2018. A year later, XCX told Pitchfork, “I’m really grateful that [Taylor] asked me on that tour. But as an artist, it kind of felt like I was getting up on stage and waving to five-year-olds.”
Despite that comment, when Vulture published a cover story about XCX in the wake of the success of “Brat” in 2024, Swift was quoted as telling the outlet, “I’ve been blown away by Charli’s melodic sensibilities since I first heard ‘Stay Away’ in 2011. 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.”
This week, in an intro to “Actually Romantic” recorded for Amazon Music, Swift said the song is about “realizing that someone else has kind of had a one-sided adversarial relationship with you that you didn’t know about.”
“All of a sudden they start doing too much, and they start letting you know that, actually, you’ve been living in their head rent-free and you had no idea,” Swift explained. “It’s presenting itself as them sort of resenting or having a problem with you, but taking that and you just accepting that as love and you just accepting it as attention and affection.”
Meanwhile, a video from XCX’s early “Brat” era also began recirculating Friday, in which the singer addresses what some fans perceived as “diss tracks” on the album. She in part explained that songs like “Sympathy Is a Knife” are more reflective of the insecurity she felt among other pop stars of her generation and weren’t necessarily meant as a dig at them.
“They’re really just about how it’s so complicated being an artist, especially a female artist where you are pitted against your peers but also expected to be best friends with every single person constantly, and if you’re not, you’re, like, deemed a bad feminist,” she said. “These songs are kind of about how as a woman, as an artist, some days you can feel on top of the world, some days you can feel unbelievably insecure, other days you can feel highly competitive, sometimes you can feel like literal trash — and it’s really emotional and complicated to deal with, and we’re not supposed to talk about it, but these songs do talk about it.”
If you think sympathy if a knife was a diss track then here’s your reminder on what Charli said pic.twitter.com/G1yvcyfpBc
— esra (@1989healy) October 2, 2025
The last time XCX was caught up in a “diss track” scandal was with “Girl, So Confusing,” also off of “Brat.” That song was (correctly) presumed to be about the singer’s relationship with Lorde. Lorde later joined XCX on a remix of the song to put the drama behind them. Maybe Swift and XCX will work it out on the remix too?
