Holly Humberstone: "It couldn’t be more of a scarier world than we live in right now"

Holly Humberstone is, by her own admission, a little worn down. She’s just back from two weekends at Coachella, and is now in the welcome chaos of releasing a new album.

A schedule like that isn’t anything she isn’t used to. The 26-year-old from Grantham started out with a BBC Introducing slot at Glastonbury 2019, before Lewis Capaldi stumbled across her music online and invited Humberstone to open for him on tour.

A BRITs Rising Star Award came in 2022, placing her alongside past winners Adele, Florence + The Machine and Sam Fender, followed by stadium tours supporting Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift. It’s unsurprising, then, that her 2023 goth-pop debut Paint My Bedroom Black was a record about turbulence, anxiety and displacement.

Follow-up Cruel World is more upbeat, steady and grounded; less rooted in an arena or a Californian desert than in a creaky old family home in Lincolnshire. Holly has been helping her retired parents clear it out, and the house, and the slow business of leaving it, soaks into the record.

“It was this big country house in the middle of nowhere that once was this gorgeous, grand hunting lodge,” Holly says. “It had become more and more decrepit over time. It was just so quirky, and it shaped us.

“That’s where I grew up and had these experiences I wrote my early songs about. My parents were at work for a lot of my childhood. They both worked for the NHS and had proper, real, life-saving jobs. My three sisters and I raised each other, and it was just this big space for us to be creative, and to play and have fun.

“My music career began, and I’ve been swept up in this incredible whirlwind,” she continues. “This past year-and-a-half, while I’ve been writing this album, I’ve really had time to just exist as a human being, and I’ve been going back and forth from London to the Midlands, alongside writing, to help my parents clear out.

“My sisters and I all went back home, and it was really strange being there, 10 years later. I was clearing out my room and rediscovered so many little trinkets and items that held so much weight for me as a kid. I found a jewellery box I used to love, a book of fairytales I remember being obsessed with, my old ballet shoes, theatre programmes...

“It’s an important time to look back. We live in a crazy, chaotic world, especially in the industry we work in. It’s kind of like, what’s next? Where am I going? You rarely take the time to look back and see what you’ve come from.”

The album draws on the dark and/or fantasy classics of Humberstone’s childhood and beyond: Brothers Grimm, James And The Giant Peach, Nosferatu, The Red Shoes, Black Swan.  There’s also an element of Alice In Wonderland and The Wizard Of Oz, as coming-of-age stories of a girl entering the unknown.

With her “anchor” in Lincolnshire gone, Humberstone has been restoring a place of her own in South-East London alongside her sisters and friends.

“100%,” Holly agrees. “These were already the tales I was inspired by since I was a kid. Alice In Wonderland and Wizard Of Oz are stories about a heroine who’s overstimulated and overwhelmed by adult things.

“It can be really scary. We’re growing up in the weirdest times. It couldn’t be more of a scarier world than we live in right now. And I think it’s natural for anybody to need somewhere to escape to.”

For Humberstone, that escape is the studio. Cruel World was built through daily sessions with long-time collaborator Rob Milton.

“When I go into the studio, it’s my way of romanticising my life, telling the stories and shaping them how I want. It’s a kind of protection I put on, or a shield. I have some control over what goes on in the studio and how the songs sound, where I don’t think any of us have much control over what’s going on in the world.”

Continuing the thread of escapism is the visual side of Cruel World, made with the help of Holly’s sister Eleri and creative director Silken Weinberg, best known for her work with Ethel Cain. The dark, gothic-leaning aesthetic sits within a wider moment, a kind of dreamy reimagination of the past that takes different shapes depending on who is doing it.

Lana Del Rey and Florence + The Machine have long been gesturing towards versions of it, and the recent Wuthering Heights brought it to the cinema.

“There’s so much harshness in the world,” Holly says. “There’s so much frightening shit going on, and I think people are probably using fantasy and referring back to that childlike wonder because we kind of need to at the moment. Even going on my phone, where everything has felt so fake for a long time, it weirdly feels so fucking real, and so vivid, and so extreme. I think it’s normal for people to need somewhere to escape to. The real world is too scary.”

Which part of the real world is scaring her most?

“I mean, it feels like it kind of goes without saying,” she says. “The genocide, maybe. And yeah, shit going on all over the world. I don’t really know if I want to elaborate any further on that. But if you’re a human being, you’re gonna be affected by what’s going on in the world. If you’re an empath, then it’s natural to feel what’s going on very viscerally, and I think it’s completely okay for people to want a bit of an escape.”

Holly Humberstone. Photo: Silken Weinberg

For all the fairytales, the record is still shaped by real people. Love is a theme, in all its good and bad forms, but especially platonic love for the women in Humberstone’s life who have shaped her. The track ‘Lucy’ is the clearest example.

“My sisterhood, and the girls I have around me and have shaped me, it would be very strange for me to not write about that,” Holly says. “Women have been so integral to my life. Throughout the different phases and changes I’ve gone through, I’ve had this amazing core group of women I can go to for advice, or lean on, and vice versa.”

She’s spoken before about the all-girls secondary school where she felt students were set against each other. The real issues revealed themselves later.

“I felt like the school’s methods and ways of making us do well was to pit us against each other,” she says. “I had great friends at school, core friendships I’ll have forever. Coming out of that into the music industry, I don’t think the issue was other girls, ever. It was always the surplus of dudes in my world all of a sudden.

“As women, we have to work 10 times harder, we have to look nice every day. Whereas I see a lot of my male peers throwing on a hoodie and jeans and that being fine, which is totally fine, but that wouldn’t work for me, because my image is so much a part of selling my music.

“Maybe you don’t notice as much if you’re a man. I’ve been in writing rooms full of men for my whole career, and I’ve never felt like it was the right time to bring it up, because why would they understand what I’m talking about?”

Album closer ‘Beauty Pageant’ is a poignant piano ballad that uses a shifting perspective to lay bare the pressures of being a female artist in what can be a superficial industry. And it’s one of the most honest, self-aware songs you’ll hear on a pop record.

“I’m really proud of ‘Beauty Pageant’. It was a song I’d wanted to write for a long time, but I didn’t want it to feel like I was complaining, because I love getting to do this as a job,” Holly says. “It’s a song for myself, and for anybody else who feels exhausted by having to maintain a facade, or image.”

To play devil’s advocate, does the extra layer of effort make the music itself more interesting?

“Yeah, you know what, I do think that’s probably true,” she says. “All the best musicians right now I can think of, most of them are women. That probably has to do with the fact we’re used to trying harder, and putting more into what we’re doing to be heard, and to be seen, among men who aren’t really doing all that much.

“On the other hand, the time that goes into my beauty regime, I could be sleeping. There are times I’m awake late at night because I’ve got too much to do, and my boyfriend’s just asleep, getting all the sleep he can. And then I’m up straight away in the morning, so early, because I have a million things to do. I’ve gotta do my nails, I’ve gotta shave my legs. I know it’s stuff I’m choosing to do, but part of selling myself and my music is having to look nice. I don’t think it would sell if I didn’t put all this effort in.

“But yeah, I do think women make more interesting art in general. I think we’re more sensitive, more empathetic. Feminine traits that are perceived as weaknesses are quite the opposite. A lot of feminine traits are huge strengths, and are things I’m kind of trying to hold onto.”

That sensitivity, she says, is also what she wants people to take from the record.

“I hope that people feel kind of understood as humans,” Holly says. “When I was writing this album, I wasn’t thinking too hard, apart from just about being honest and truthful, and putting my real self and my real feelings into the songs.

“The overarching theme of the album is about feeling everything. I want people to come to a show and feel it’s okay to either cry, or dance, or scream, or be an emotional wreck, whatever.

“For me, it’s about being human and accepting that life is kind of chaotic, and it’s okay to feel everything all at once. Again, we grow up in weird times, and it’s okay to feel overwhelmed by life, and to not be able to make sense of the world around you, because I don’t either. That’s why I’m writing songs. I’m trying to figure it out. And I want people to feel that from my music, and to feel understood.”

• Cruel World is out now.