Holly Humberstone: Once Upon A Time…
After rising to prominence in the midst of the pandemic, Holly Humberstone spent half a decade on the move. Having finally taken a break to reconnect with normal life, she’s returned with ‘Cruel World’ - a richly woven third album imbued with love and nostalgia.
“I feel like I’ve done more growing up in the past year and a half than I have in the past 10,” Holly Humberstone quips, joining our Zoom call from a quiet corner of her home. “It’s been my first chance to just exist as a human being.”
Harry Styles evidently isn’t the only popstar to have discovered the benefits of taking some time out as of late. After coming off her own marathon run of tours, mixing headliners with support slots for the likes of Lewis Capaldi, girl in red, Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift, it was time for Holly to take a breather too. On top of performing the world over, in the five years since her debut she hadn’t managed to go even one without releasing a new body of work: 2020’s breakout EP ‘Falling Asleep At The Wheel’ was soon chased up by 2021’s ‘The Walls Are Way Too Thin’; her first album, ‘Can You Afford To Lose Me?’, arrived in 2022 (along with that year’s BRITs Rising Star Award); her second, ‘Paint My Bedroom Black’, followed in 2023; and in 2024, she put out a third EP titled ‘work in progress’.
“Since we came out of lockdown, [it was] just this constant loop of shows, touring, promo,” Holly says. “It was so weird coming off tour and thinking, ‘right, I guess I need to figure out who I am as a person now, after all of that - let alone as an artist’.”
Instead of struggling to parallel park strangers’ cars in Rome or taking up residence in Berghain à la Styles, Holly’s path to self-discovery involved upping sticks from her childhood home in the Midlands and buying a dilapidated auction house in South East London with her sisters and best friends. “We’ve kind of just moved from one old, falling down house to the next,” she grins. “We were like, ‘fuck it, we can definitely figure out how to do a renovation project’. Obviously not - we’re just a bunch of girlies. We’ve had to try to not get scammed and figure out how to sand floors and plaster walls, and none of us know what the fuck we’re doing!”
The remote, possibly ghost-harbouring Grantham home she grew up in became key Holly Humberstone lore when it was immortalised in ‘Haunted House’, the stirring lullaby swiped from her sophomore EP. Finally leaving it behind meant raking over more than two decades’ worth of trinkets, treasures and long-lost Christmas presents: dance programmes, her old ballet shoes, forgotten pieces of jewellery and, of course, a copy of Grimms’ Fairy Tales - something of a core text for the visual and sonic world she’s now crafting.
“That process was really cathartic, and obviously sad, but it was amazing to have the opportunity to go home and make peace with the fact that this was bookending my childhood,” she says. “I guess it just reminded me of who I am at my core, and what I loved as a person before I got swept up in this chaos.”
Other titles in her early literary canon included Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - all stories, Holly notes, about a heroine who’s generally a bit freaked out by the real world, and processes that by escaping into a fantasy parallel one. “That’s kind of what making music feels like, and what making this project has really felt like - a shield from everything that I find overwhelming and scary,” she says. “I hope that it can feel like that for other people; a bit of respite from this terrifying, horrendous (for the most part) world that we exist in, in 2026.”
‘This project’ is her aptly titled third album, ‘Cruel World’, which comes accompanied by elaborate visuals steeped in the theatrical playfulness of the memorabilia she’d unearthed in her old bedroom. ‘Cruel World’ was written over the course of her time away from the spotlight, when the studio became her office, and music her way of fleeing the Polyfilla and home-reno video tutorials now filling up her personal life. Escapism bleeds into the record: while the swaggering ‘Red Chevy’ mentions the corner shops and video games of Holly’s everyday, the beat-up blue Ford that inspired the track receives something of a Hollywood makeover; elsewhere, ‘Blue Dream’ wistfully recalls a hazy montage of falling head-over-heels for someone over a lazy summer of flowers, dancing and ice cream.
‘Cruel World’ is an album centred on love - the good and the bad. It finds Holly stubbornly infatuated on lovesick opener ‘Make It All Better’ and the rich, Dracula-inspired single ‘Die Happy’; she’s miserable on shimmering cut ‘White Noise’ and, on ‘Drunk Dialling’, she’s somewhere between the two, as woozy synths perfectly capture the intoxicated, glassy-eyed conviction that reaching out to that person right this very second is a fantastic idea, actually. “Love, just like nostalgia, is this really painful thing, and that’s why it’s so powerful,” Holly muses. “You can’t separate out the highest joy from the lowest, deepest darkest sadness; they exist together in this confusing cocktail of emotions.”
As anyone with a battered copy of Dolly Alderton’s memoir on their shelf could tell you, love is a many-faceted thing, and happily, on ‘Cruel World’, romance isn’t the only order of the day. ‘Lucy’, a tender track of fingerpicked guitar that paints vignettes of Holly’s friends navigating their way through their own lives, is as much a besotted love letter as ‘Make It All Better’. “People really sleep on platonic love, but that’s the main source of love in my life,” Holly beams. “I’m so lucky that I have such an amazing group of people around me. Why wouldn’t I write about that, and about girlhood?”
Holly cites growing up with three sisters and attending an all-girls school as the reason for her close affinity with girlhood, which has gifted her a sense of community that’s been present throughout her life. Like love, that comes with considerable highs - namely, forging particularly close bonds with her friends, and learning that everything people generally perceive as weaknesses in femininity are actually her greatest strengths - as well as some equally considerable lows. “I had this really crippling issue of viewing other girls as competitors - it’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but I know I’m not the only one who feels like this,” she says. “It’s a constant thing that I’m having to consciously unlearn.”
When Holly’s career first took off, that instinct to compete was only magnified by the external pressures suddenly encircling her from the music industry gods and their penchant for pitching female artists against one another. But six years down the line, a newfound self-assurance - not to mention sharing stages with a lot of her supposed rivals - has made it far easier to block out the noise. “No music fan is going to pick one artist to stan and say ‘fuck everyone else’; that’s just not how it works!” she points out. “Everybody’s got something special and unique about them and their music, which is why people like them. You have to figure out what that is and commit to it, double down and just be you. Billie [Eilish] has already done Billie in the best way that anybody could, so what’s the point in trying to redo that? [It’s the] same with Olivia [Rodrigo], or whoever.”
The intersection of fame and femininity comes into particular focus on ‘Beauty Pageant’, the album’s arresting finale, delivered with something of a world-weary smile. “You’re not in the Midlands anymore,” Holly reminds herself over the swelling piano ballad - except that, instead of a velour-clad Jeff Goldblum, her Wizard of Oz is the smoke and mirrors of stardom.
“It’s a really unnatural high to experience being on stage and seeing ‘[your name] - sold out’, and then going into your dressing room and all of that’s gone,” she explains. “It’s such a fleeting thing. I’ve realised that seeking validation from external sources, or the internet, where we judge ourselves fully on stats - how many likes we get or how many followers we have - is obviously so not true and silly, but it’s really hard not to place all of your value on those external sources when it should be coming from within.” While the sickly sweet adoration of ‘Die Happy’ and life-affirming, sunny choruses of ‘To Love Somebody’ are album standouts, it’s these more vulnerable confessions that make the record stick. On ‘Peachy’, she’s back behind the piano, this time to protest against the prospect of long-term commitment: “God knows I’m 24 / I’m still a baby,” she insists. “Don’t put your faith in me.”
These, then, are the contours of Holly’s ‘Cruel World’; wrapped up in the storybook imagery of her childhood, they inject the mundane with fairytale romance, yet are anchored by reminders that, beneath it all, her twenties still feel like they make no more sense than anyone else’s. “As a kid, I really thought that by 26 I would be this refined lady, and that’s just never going to happen,” she grins. “I wake up feeling like a different person every single day. Some days are better than others; some days I feel amazing and some days I feel like shit and I don’t wanna leave the house - both are fine.”
Lately she’s had to start leaving the house a lot more often to take the record on tour, playing first in Europe and the UK before heading out across North America this summer. She likens the writing and the sharing of her music to flexing two very different muscles, and, despite the past 18 months giving her time to think about her next move and produce a record she’s proud of, offering it to the world for scrutiny still hasn’t quite lost its edge.
“It always feels kind of intimidating and scary when it comes to releasing music, because I do write quite personal songs,” she admits. “I just have to remind myself that this has been my dream since I was seven, and I get to do this every day and nothing’s that deep - it’s just music.”
That rationality seems to be the break talking. The time away didn’t just give her a better understanding of who Holly Humberstone is when she’s at home - the memories that shaped her, and the relationships that hold her together - but of Holly Humberstone the artist, by way of better managing the project, her team and her mental health.
“I’ve had time to think about it, and about how I wanna tell this next chapter of the story,” she nods. “This project feels like the most genuine thing that I’ve released to date, because I’ve had this time to connect to who I am and be a bit more conscious about every decision that I’m making. I’m just really proud of it. I love it.”
‘Cruel World’ is out 10th April via Polydor Records.
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