London singer-songwriter CHARLS has released her debut album, Heartbreak Looks Good On Me, turning the fallout of a breakup into a 13-track record about betrayal, recovery and learning to trust herself again.

Released via The Orchard, the album arrives after a year-long run of singles that gradually revealed its emotional arc. CHARLS closed 2025 with the vulnerable "Heads Up," followed this year by "Trust My Gut," "Begging On My Birthday," "Out In The Open" and "Paranoid Heart." Together, the songs trace a relationship's collapse and the less orderly process of rebuilding after it.

Much of Heartbreak Looks Good On Me was created with producer Phil Simmonds, whose credits include Rizzle Kicks and Zara Larsson. The album's defining idea, however, emerged during CHARLS' first writing session following her breakup. Working with producer Cam Blackwood and songwriter Nick Hahn, she received photographs from a post-breakup shoot while they were in the studio.

Seeing herself looking confident despite what she had been experiencing became the spark for the album's title track and ultimately helped shape the larger project.

"That song has been the silver lining throughout what has been an extremely turbulent chapter of my life," CHARLS said of "Heartbreak Looks Good On Me." "It's repeatedly picked me up off the floor. It was written in realtime as I healed from heartbreak. The music was the friend I needed to help me piece myself back together again and I really hope it can be that for other people too."

She added that much of the project was made with her best friend "in the basement of a carpet shop in North London," an appropriately unvarnished setting for an album she describes as "raw, honest, real."

The release also puts a spotlight on "Paranoid Heart," a collaboration with singer-songwriter Sarah Close. The pair wrote the song after discovering they had experienced similar betrayals in relationships, channeling that shared anger into one of the album's more confrontational moments.

Heartbreak Looks Good On Me also represents a professional reset for CHARLS. Previously recording under the name Charlotte Jane, she released her debut EP Nowhere To Hide in 2019 and later followed with Refuge. She was initially discovered by Grammy-nominated producer Toby Gad and has since opened for Lewis Capaldi, Tom Odell, Jess Glynne and Bastille, while appearing at festivals including Reading & Leeds, Lollapalooza Berlin and Isle of Wight.

Now performing as CHARLS, a longtime pet name, the 27-year-old singer is approaching the next phase of her career as an independent artist. Rather than treating heartbreak as the album's destination, Heartbreak Looks Good On Me uses it as the starting point for a record increasingly concerned with what happens when someone stops measuring herself through the person who left.

Heartbreak Looks Good On Me tracklist:

1. Intro
2. Where Are You Now
3. Begging On My Birthday
4. Trust My Gut
5. Out In The Open
6. Love And Leave
7. 21 Days
8. I'm Not Missing You
9. Know Better
10. Paranoid Heart
11. Heads Up
12. Heartbreak Looks Good On Me
13. Build Me Up

Heartbreak Looks Good On Me is available now on streaming platforms.