Holly Humberstone talks about her childhood the way some people enthuse about a beloved horror movie. It was, she says, eerie – but in a good way.
“I grew up in this old, crumbling house,” the singer explains. “There was nobody else really around apart from my three sisters and me. My parents are both working for the NHS and very busy. So it felt like we raised each other in this spooky, weirdly comforting house.”
Those memories came rushing back as she recorded her new album, Cruel World, a collection of dark and stormy electro bangers and gothic power ballads. Just how dark is made clear in the video for its lead single, To Love Somebody, in which Humberstone sings through a nosebleed and is pursued by a shadowy vampire straight out of FW Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu.
These creepy images were inspired by a visit to her family home, just outside Grantham, in Lincolnshire, a few years ago. She’d gone back to rummage through her old belongings in preparation for a permanent move to London. The experience was both hugely poignant – who doesn’t feel a quiver when digging through the detritus of their past? – and slightly unsettling. Above all, it brought her back to her idiosyncratic upbringing.
“I remember one of my earliest memories at Christmas – my favourite present that I think I ever received was this book of Brothers Grimm fairy tales. I remember it being so unlike the stories that I was told before. They were so dark and macabre. I had this weird fascination with them. Some of those things were so disturbing that you can’t really look away.”
Humberstone was still at school when she was discovered by her local radio station, BBC Lincolnshire, in 2017. This led to a slot on the BBC Introducing stage at the Glastonbury festival two years later, followed by a Brit rising-star award (an accolade previously won by Adele and Florence + The Machine). Everything snowballed from there: she went on tour with Lewis Capaldi and had a UK top-five hit in 2023 with her debut album, Paint My Bedroom Black.
An ambitious artist, she has put a great deal of thought into how she presents her music. Cruel World comes with a carefully curated look, developed in collaboration with her sister Eleri and the creative director and photographer Silken Weinberg – best known for her work with the goth-pop sensation Ethel Cain.
Together they have come up with an aesthetic that might be described as artisanal goth”. In the video to the title track, for instance, Humberstone is done up as an emo Joan of Arc dancing in a graveyard and miming to a tune that suggests a folk-horror Taylor Swift.
It’s a striking look that captures much of the feel of the record (though not all of it; many of her lyrics orbit the more traditional subjects of heartbreak and being adrift in your 20s). Every pop star needs a vibe or an era, whether it’s Harry Styles going electroclash in Berlin or that time in 2023 when Ed Sheeran pretended he was Bon Iver. If there’s a downside it’s that putting yourself out there draws the haters with a vengeance.
Holly Humberstone says she noticed early in her career that women in music are held to different standards than men. Photograph: Silken Weinberg
“I feel like it’s one of those things where you can’t win. Recently, I’ve been posting clips of my new song and video that I’ve been obsessed with and so excited to share. I feel it represents me so much. And 90 per cent of the comments are just lovely. But there’s always [one or two]… no matter what I do, people are, like, ‘Oh, you’ve just copied her.’ No, they already did that the best. What would be the point in me trying to create someone else’s thing?”
The rush to judge is especially apparent with female artists, she says. She noticed early in her career that women in music are held to different standards from men.
“I feel like it’s something that I’m only sort of comfortable talking about now because I’ve come out the other side. I grew up with three sisters. There was never a competitive vibe internally between us. We just loved each other – there was never that, you know? It was kind of when we started to get a bit older, all of these external pressures set this competitive vibe.”
That was compounded by her experiences with the education system. “I went on to an all-girls secondary school. I don’t know how it happened, but I feel like their ethos, their way of making us perform and do well, was just pitting us against each other. I remember coming out of school and going straight into the music industry. I had this really terrible, toxic view of my peers and other girls that were just like me – who were trying to follow their dreams and be themselves and do the same thing that I was doing. It’s embarrassing to admit, but it’s not our fault. It’s something that’s been drilled into us.”
Humberstone sings about this on the final song on the record, Beauty Pageant – a celebration of sisterhood informed by her encounters as a woman in an industry that, even now, is dominated by men.
“I’m in a writing room full of men most of the time. It’s not really the place to bring it up. [But] I feel like it’s a huge part of my life. Girlhood is so core to who I am. And the girls in my life are the most important thing I have to lean on. All these incredible women in my life have defined me – who I am and how I think. I felt it’s weird not to address this thing we’re all feeling: society putting this strange pressure on us to think there’s only room for one of us to win.”
‘It’s the same with making music or making art,’ Holly Humberstone says. ‘It’s all chaos, and we have to be there to receive it and just accept that none of us know what’s going on. That’s the beauty of life.’ Photograph: Silken Weinberg
There is also an expectation that you will present yourself in a certain way. “It’s this bullshit. Obviously it’s not how it should be. The same pressures don’t apply to men. My beauty regime takes me hours every morning. I do it for myself. But also it’s currency. I have to look nice because otherwise, unfortunately, I don’t think my album is going to sell. It sounds silly, but the same rules don’t apply for dudes.”
All of these thoughts were pinging around Humberstone’s head when Taylor Swift asked her to open for her at her Eras tour show at Wembley Stadium, in London, on August 16th, 2024. She sees Swift as a role model – someone who doesn’t put up with any of the industry’s nonsense. Plus it was a thrill to say “Hello, Wembley” and perform to the biggest audience of her career.
“She is so down to support other women in the industry and just championing the girlies. We kind of are running the show at the moment. It’s the time for the girlies. It feels very cool to be amongst some amazing, inspiring women.”
At 25, Humberstone has also reached the age when you discover that you never entirely outgrow the vulnerable teenager you used to be. It’s one of the things she wrestles with on the album: how to be an adult when inside you still feel like a child.
“That feeling of not being in control of your life – I don’t think that uncertainty ever really goes away. I thought by my mid-20s I’d be so refined as this adult woman. Speaking to my mum now, who’s just turned 60, she says that she still feels like a 14-year-old girl inside. I don’t think that feeling ever goes away. It’s been quite freeing to accept that sense of the unknown.”
Holly Humberstone performing on the future sounds stage during BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend at the War Memorial Park in Coventry, May 2022. Photograph: Ian West/PA
Life, she feels, “is a series of chaotic events happening to us”.
“It’s the same with making music or making art,” she continues. “It’s all chaos, and we have to be there to receive it and just accept that none of us know what’s going on. That’s the beauty of life. That is the through-line of the album to me. Life is an emotional rollercoaster and love is this confusing thing. We’re lucky to be here for this short amount of time. We might as well be open to all of these experiences – whether they’re good or bad or all mixed into one.”
Good or bad, Humberstone has poured her life into these new songs and created something dark and mysterious – a horror movie soundtrack where the jump scares take the form of one brilliantly banging chorus after another.
Cruel World is released by Polydor