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Holly Humberstone

Holly Humberstone

Place has always been the centre spine to Holly Humberstone’s lucid songwriting. Falling Asleep At The Wheel, her breakthrough EP released five years ago this summer, introduced us to a young woman trying to understand the walls in which she grew up. A haunted house with friendly ghosts and three sisters, Holly’s evocative storytelling bore “Vanilla,” “Haunted House,” “Overkill,” “Deep End,” and more songs that captured an introverted girl and avid observer of stories, with cartoon green eyes that saw the pinprick details of the lives of the people closest to her. The debut catapulted Holly from her gothic family home in Grantham in the Midlands, to the world stage. Winning the BRIT Rising Star Award in 2022 - presented to her by Sam Fender - and performing “London Is Lonely” at the awards show, watched by millions at home, was another step into her place. Having moved to London to pursue music, Holly wrote The Walls Are Way Too Thin EP, feeling like the new walls she was building around her in this new city were paper thin. Songs like “Scarlett” and “Friendly Fire” became time capsules into old friendships and new romance. Her critically acclaimed #3 debut album Paint My Bedroom Black followed, partly written in hotel rooms, in fragments of life on the road, trying to find her way back home. Late night messages to friends in new cities, feeling homesick, but touring North America with Girl in Red and Olivia Rodrigo, Holly was living the dream she had dreamt of as a little girl. But she wasn’t in the Midlands anymore. This is where Cruel World begins. A new Place. Holly’s Place. Turning 25 and moving into a shell of a house in South-East London that she bought in auction with her two sisters and best friend, Holly took on a new project. Getting to work on the house — which was falling apart after years of neglect — she made it her mission to put it back together. Holly painted her bedroom pink. Where Paint My Bedroom Black was steeped in turbulence and longing for home, Cruel World is anchored in a new sense of belonging. “Music isn’t the stressful part of my life anymore,” Holly says. “It became the anchor and the constant, while everything else was shifting.” She treated the studio as an office for the first time, getting the Overground to long-time collaborator and producer Rob Milton’s studio in Walthamstow, and back again everyday. Like “Scarlett” before them, new songs “Lauren” and “Lucy” are laser images into her best friends’ lives, helping them through predicaments with modern life, love and internet culture. Rather than a simple “coming of age,” the record feels like a rite of passage: a vivid portrait of what it means to stand at the threshold of adulthood, redefining home, love, and identity on her own terms. Holly also deliberately shaped songs with live performance in mind. Having toured the world with her beloved band, from Lollapalooza to Coachella, Glastonbury to her first festival headline at Barn on The Farm, Holly was invited to support Sam Fender at St. James' Park to 50,000 people and Taylor Swift on her Era’s tour, playing Wembley Stadium to 90,000 fans. “I’ve had the most fun of my life on tour with my band,” she says. “I wrote a lot of this to record with them in mind. The songs are stacked with backing vocals because I wanted it to feel communal, like we’re all in it together.” Sonically, Cruel World stitches nostalgia into forward motion: echoes of The Smiths and childhood car journeys refracted through bold, festival-ready pop songs. Visually, Holly and her sister Eleri have created a fairytale world inspired by the trinkets of her childhood and films like Edward Scissorhands and James and the Giant Peach. “Like a monster I’m not afraid of anymore, I wanted the visuals to feel like opening a dusty old book and stepping into a story,” she says. Cruel World for Holly is about claiming agency as both an artist and a woman. “This feels like my work more than before,” she says. “I’m in control of everything. No is a complete sentence. I just wanted to make something I’ll be proud of looking back at, something that is mine.”

About 
Holly Humberstone

Place has always been the centre spine to Holly Humberstone’s lucid songwriting. Falling Asleep At The Wheel, her breakthrough EP released five years ago this summer, introduced us to a young woman trying to understand the walls in which she grew up. A haunted house with friendly ghosts and three sisters, Holly’s evocative storytelling bore “Vanilla,” “Haunted House,” “Overkill,” “Deep End,” and more songs that captured an introverted girl and avid observer of stories, with cartoon green eyes that saw the pinprick details of the lives of the people closest to her. The debut catapulted Holly from her gothic family home in Grantham in the Midlands, to the world stage. Winning the BRIT Rising Star Award in 2022 - presented to her by Sam Fender - and performing “London Is Lonely” at the awards show, watched by millions at home, was another step into her place. Having moved to London to pursue music, Holly wrote The Walls Are Way Too Thin EP, feeling like the new walls she was building around her in this new city were paper thin. Songs like “Scarlett” and “Friendly Fire” became time capsules into old friendships and new romance. Her critically acclaimed #3 debut album Paint My Bedroom Black followed, partly written in hotel rooms, in fragments of life on the road, trying to find her way back home. Late night messages to friends in new cities, feeling homesick, but touring North America with Girl in Red and Olivia Rodrigo, Holly was living the dream she had dreamt of as a little girl. But she wasn’t in the Midlands anymore. This is where Cruel World begins. A new Place. Holly’s Place. Turning 25 and moving into a shell of a house in South-East London that she bought in auction with her two sisters and best friend, Holly took on a new project. Getting to work on the house — which was falling apart after years of neglect — she made it her mission to put it back together. Holly painted her bedroom pink. Where Paint My Bedroom Black was steeped in turbulence and longing for home, Cruel World is anchored in a new sense of belonging. “Music isn’t the stressful part of my life anymore,” Holly says. “It became the anchor and the constant, while everything else was shifting.” She treated the studio as an office for the first time, getting the Overground to long-time collaborator and producer Rob Milton’s studio in Walthamstow, and back again everyday. Like “Scarlett” before them, new songs “Lauren” and “Lucy” are laser images into her best friends’ lives, helping them through predicaments with modern life, love and internet culture. Rather than a simple “coming of age,” the record feels like a rite of passage: a vivid portrait of what it means to stand at the threshold of adulthood, redefining home, love, and identity on her own terms. Holly also deliberately shaped songs with live performance in mind. Having toured the world with her beloved band, from Lollapalooza to Coachella, Glastonbury to her first festival headline at Barn on The Farm, Holly was invited to support Sam Fender at St. James' Park to 50,000 people and Taylor Swift on her Era’s tour, playing Wembley Stadium to 90,000 fans. “I’ve had the most fun of my life on tour with my band,” she says. “I wrote a lot of this to record with them in mind. The songs are stacked with backing vocals because I wanted it to feel communal, like we’re all in it together.” Sonically, Cruel World stitches nostalgia into forward motion: echoes of The Smiths and childhood car journeys refracted through bold, festival-ready pop songs. Visually, Holly and her sister Eleri have created a fairytale world inspired by the trinkets of her childhood and films like Edward Scissorhands and James and the Giant Peach. “Like a monster I’m not afraid of anymore, I wanted the visuals to feel like opening a dusty old book and stepping into a story,” she says. Cruel World for Holly is about claiming agency as both an artist and a woman. “This feels like my work more than before,” she says. “I’m in control of everything. No is a complete sentence. I just wanted to make something I’ll be proud of looking back at, something that is mine.”

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