I’d love to say I’d be a gorgeous elf,” says Holly Humberstone with an impish grin, “but let’s be real: I’d be a f***ing hobbit.” The 2022 Brits Rising Star winner is talking about who’d she be in The Lord of the Rings – she discovered the films aged 15 at a New Year’s Eve party she didn’t want to be at, and has been lost in Tolkien’s universe ever since. “There’s a story called ‘Beren and Lúthien’,” she says. “It’s really, really sad and heartbreaking. That’s maybe my favourite.” She pauses. “The fans will come for me with pitchforks if I get the lore wrong.”
The Lord of the Rings, in its way, explains a lot: the escapism, the dark fairytales, the compulsion to build whole mythologies out of feeling. Cruel World, Humberstone’s second album, is steeped in all of it. Her sound is very much a patchwork: Taylor Swift’s diaristic instincts; Phoebe Bridgers’ arch folk intimacy; vocoders and synths that are pure 1975. Stitching it together is a quavering, gossamer voice that gives even the most festival-ready chorus the texture of a confession.
The result deals not in grand gestures, but in the granular: picking at the scabs of her life until something universal bleeds through. Not catastrophic heartbreak, but the specific ache of being somewhere your friends are not; the oddly alienating hum of a hotel room at midnight. Where 2023’s Paint My Bedroom Black yearned for home, Cruel World has finally found it – shades of The Smiths here, a rush of classic Britpop there, all coalescing into her most accomplished record yet.
We meet at a members’ club in Mayfair. Humberstone has just disposed of a half-eaten takeaway in the street; she wanted to finish it in the cab, but her driver wasn’t having it. After a quick cigarette, she bounds in. Dark-haired and flush-cheeked, wearing a velvet choker, the 26-year-old has the look of a Pre-Raphaelite portrait come to life. A self-confessed peacemaker, she was the girl in the family who listened rather than held court. “I’m never going to be the loudest person in the room,” she says. But words tumble out of her anyway – hesitant at first, then all at once. There’s a nerdish exuberance to her; “awkward” is how she often describes herself. Before she leaves the building, she disappears to the toilets to change into a Bora Aksu two-piece for a party she’s going to; she steamed the outfit in the corridor outside in full view.
Humberstone and her three sisters grew up in what she calls the Haunted House – a sprawling gothic cottage in Grantham, Lincolnshire (birthplace of Margaret Thatcher and half of Sleaford Mods), where her parents, both NHS medics, encouraged their children to be creative and make a mess. It was, she has said, her “ultimate comfort, sacred space”. Then her parents retired to Wales; her sisters scattered. She moved to London. It was a bit “overwhelming”. The Walls Are Way Too Thin, her second EP, arrived out of that dislocation – the sense of being surrounded by strangers, the city an alien thing pressing in from outside.
She has since found her footing. Last year, at auction, she bought a house in southeast London with her two sisters and her best friend. Moving out meant boxing up the Haunted House – and in doing so, she found the relics of a childhood she hadn’t quite finished with. Ballet shoes. Alice in Wonderland books. Tim Burton films she used to watch under a duvet. Brothers Grimm fairytales she’d devoured in the dark. “I realised the ghosts weren’t scary any more,” she says. “Like a monster I used to be afraid of.” She painted her bedroom pink.
Humberstone arrived in the music industry at 17, with no alpha instinct and no idea how loud she’d need to be. “Suddenly being in a situation where you’re required to have strong opinions – I was like, ‘Oh s***’.” The music industry, she has found, does not welcome quiet empaths. There was, too, the small matter of a music teacher who’d warned a teenage Humberstone – who already had a song on BBC Radio 1 – that she would struggle to earn a place in music college. What would she tell them now? “Be a bit more careful how you speak to young people who have ambitions. The arts are a legitimate career path.”
Humberstone now has 3.6 million monthly Spotify listeners and played Coachella on Friday, the day the new album was released. Just as she’s become more confident and louder, so she’s learnt to keep her label at arm’s length. “No is a complete sentence,” she says. “I’m in control of everything.” Nobody, she adds, knows her project better than she does. “Because it’s my name. It’s me. I just felt ready to grab stuff by the balls. Be the boss.” Still, trusted collaborators are the key to broader independence. She works closely with her sister Eleri, now her creative director, and with longtime producer and close friend Rob Milton, formerly of cult Nottingham band Dog Is Dead, a group she idolised as a teenager. “It’s almost telepathic now,” she says of that partnership.
Her tracks are populated by the people she loves. “Scarlett”, “Lauren”, “Lucy” – songs for friends, laser-sharp images of the women around her. “To Love Somebody” was written for a sister going through the wreckage of her first real relationship. “When you’re in that really dark place, you can’t see the silver lining,” she says. “The grief you’re experiencing is just a measure of the love you felt.” She was listening to Joni Mitchell’s Hejira on the way here – “I need to go deep into the whole discography” – and notes that Prince is capable of shifting her mood from terrible to ecstatic in a single bar. Of Flyte’s Will Taylor, meanwhile, she is similarly rhapsodic. “He does it all immaculately,” she says. “I’m looking for the perfectly formed song, and he finds it every time.”
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
Try for free
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
Try for free
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
Then there is Joe, her boyfriend of three-and-a-half years – a musician in Sam Fender’s band. She kept meeting him at festivals, and the connection stuck. During the grinding isolation of touring, messaging him became an anchor. I mention a recent viral Vogue article that asked: “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” Well, is it? “Having a boyfriend is embarrassing,” she says. “Being in love is a bit embarrassing. Writing soppy love songs is truly embarrassing.” She pauses again. “But we need that.”
On Cruel World, the soppy love songs in question are “Red Chevy” and “Die Happy”. The first finds her viscerally confident, demanding to be kissed by someone like they mean it. “At first it felt a little strange playing it to my dad,” says Humberstone, “but I’m 26, and having those feelings is part of who I am.” The second is darker – a gothic love song inspired by Dracula and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. “There is danger in love,” she says. “I wanted to capture that feeling of throwing yourself into it completely.”
There’s something of that, too, in her experience of performing live. “The feeling on stage in front of an audience – I don’t know of any drug that can feel that good.” Of course, the music industry demands more than that tangible communion these days. “I’ve been told I need to get on TikTok and film selfie lip-sync videos to my songs,” she says. “It’s not what I thought the job would entail as a kid.” The artists she grew up loving kept their distance; the only window into their lives was the music itself. “That was part of the allure,” she says. “It’s just not really enough any more.”
The online world and its pitfalls are the subject of “Beauty Pageant”, a sparse piano ballad that Humberstone finds nakedly personal – “the most embarrassing song I’ve ever written”. The lyrics describe a chronically online young woman seeking validation from likes and comments. “I’m reading them all,” she says, “probably like everybody – and we’re all just avoiding talking about this thing that’s messing with our mental health.” She feels the trap of being a “people pleaser”, where “one terrible comment can completely f***ing ruin my day”. In the music industry, she adds, “being pretty and showing up is seen as currency”. She thinks those rules – requiring women to be decorative as much as talented, almost all the time and everywhere – don’t apply to men in the same way. She went to an all-girls grammar school, where competition was intense. “Who’s the prettiest? Who’s the cleverest? Who has the most followers? It’s so ingrained, seeing other women as competition. You have to unlearn it.”
Humberstone is, by her own admission, still unlearning; still trying to figure out where the songs end and the content begins. “I don’t know if me as a person has that much to offer apart from my songs,” she says, far too self-critically. “I’m not the cleverest or the sharpest tool in the drawer. But I know how to write a song.” She laughs. “That’s what I can give.”
‘Cruel World’ is out now
