Charli XCX breaks silence with cryptic music snippet after ‘diss track’ from Taylor Swift

Charli XCX has posted a cryptic video after the release of Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, which contained a song that many have perceived as a ‘diss track’ towards the Brat singer.

To recap: Taylor Swift recently (3 October) dropped her twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, complete with a Sabrina Carpenter collaboration, a George Michael sample, her horniest song yet and the track “Actually Romantic” – a song which many listeners have interpreted as shots fired at Charli XCX.

The track opens with the lyrics: “I heard you call me “Boring Barbie” when the coke’s got you brave/ High-fived my ex and then you said you’re glad he ghosted me/ Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face.”

She later croons: “How many times has your boyfriend said/ ‘Why are we always talking ’bout her?'”

Conversely, 2024 Brat cut “Sympathy is a knife” heard Charli sing about being thrust into the orbit of an unnamed female superstar and her feelings of inadequacy in comparison. Charli is also now married to George Daniel, band member of The 1975; Swift briefly dated the band’s frontman Matty Healy in 2023.

On “Sympathy is a knife“, Charli sings: “I don’t wanna share this space/ I don’t wanna force a smile/ This one girl taps my insecurities/ Don’t know if it’s real or if I’m spiraling.

“One voice tells me that they laugh/ George says, ‘I’m just paranoid’/ Says he just don’t see it, he’s so naive.”

In a later verse, Charli adds: “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show/ Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick/ ‘Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried.”

All that to say that many listeners of “Actually Romantic” have, rightly or wrongly, largely identified Charli XCX as the unnamed antagonist of the Taylor Swift song.

And Charli has now broken her silence with a cryptic video of a studio session posted to her social media profiles.

<3 pic.twitter.com/sQxZVzikzm

— Charli (@charli_xcx) October 5, 2025

Captioned on Instagram Stories and X by a simple “<3”, the video is only five seconds long, but marks the first time (aside from some snaps from holiday snaps from Paris) that Charli has posted online since The Life of a Showgirl dropped.

The clip provides an ominous crescendo of music with a producer sat at a mixing desk, and little else.

It’s also entirely possible the video is unrelated to Taylor at all, and perhaps a snippet of the new music promised by Charli for Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights.

For her part, Swift has explained the “Actually Romantic” lyrics in her recorded intro for the song on Amazon Music.

According to the singer the track is “about realising that someone else has kind of had a one-sided, adversarial relationship with you that you didn’t know about.”

She continues: “And 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.

“It’s presenting itself as them sort of resenting you or having a problem with you but you take that and just accept it as love and you accept 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.”

Neither Charlie nor Taylor has publicly, explicitly addressed the rumoured feud between them.

As a wise woman once said: “I can’t wait to see how this [alleged beef] turns out.”

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