Is Taylor Swift Dissing Charli XCX on “Actually Romantic”?

“I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke's got you brave,” she sings. “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 / Some people might be offended / But it's actually sweet / All the time you've spent on me.”

Taylor further explained the song’s meaning in a track-by-track breakdown of the whole album on Amazon Music.

“[It’s] a song about realizing that someone else has kind of had a one-sided adversarial relationship with you that you didn't know about,” she said. “And all of a sudden they start, like, doing too much, and they start letting you know that actually you’ve been living in their head rent-free. You just accepting it as love and you accepting it as attention and affection and how flattering that somebody has made you such a big part of their reality when you didn't even think about this.”

Fans immediately linked the drama to Charli’s 2024 album Brat, where she openly wrestled with self-doubt and comparison in the music industry on “Sympathy Is a Knife."

“Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show / Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick," Charli sings. People assumed that “her” was Swift, since Charli’s husband, The 1975 drummer George Daniel, plays in the same band as Swift’s ex, Matty Healy.

Online, people are split over whether Swift’s diss is justified. 

“I heard the leak and all I’m going to say is I don’t think Taylor understood ‘Sympathy Is a Knife’ at all,” wrote X user @desivirgil. “You can’t call someone insecure as an insult when they’re openly admitting it. Charli isn’t dissing her. Charli is having a conversation with herself about her insecurity.”

Others took a lighter tone. 

“I think Taylor and Charli should work it out on the remix,” joked @ThePopTingz, referencing Lorde and Charli’s "Girl, So Confusing" remix. 

“Realistically tho Charli can handle a light diss track," Another user chimed in. "Her persona is largely that she’s a bitch and a proud hater.”

But that’s the thing: “Sympathy Is a Knife” wasn’t meant as a jab, and Charli’s been clear about that from the start. Before the album’s release, she posted a TikTok explaining that while Brat touches on jealousy, competition, and self-doubt, it’s not about taking shots at anyone. Aside from “Von Dutch,” she said, none of the songs were disses, but were reflections on the complicated emotions that come with being a woman in pop music. 

“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 deemed a bad feminist,” she explained. ”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 it’s complicated to deal with, and we’re not supposed to talk about it, but these songs do talk about it. And I’ll probably be chastised for it, but whatever, it’s reality.”

Swift and XCX have a shared history and mutual admiration. Charli opened for Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour in 2018 and said she was grateful for the opportunity to Pitchfork in 2019. 

Even after Brat’s release, Swift praised Charli in New York Magazine, saying, “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.”

Charli, for her part, reiterated in that same profile that her song wasn’t about anyone specific.

“People are gonna think what they want to think,” she said. “That song is about me and my feelings and my anxiety and the way my brain creates narratives and stories in my head when I feel insecure and how I don’t want to be in those situations physically when I feel self-doubt.”