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\u2019s second album, is steeped in all of it. Her sound is very much a patchwork: Taylor Swift<\/a>\u2019s diaristic instincts; Phoebe Bridgers<\/a>\u2019 arch folk intimacy; vocoders and synths that are pure 1975<\/a>. Stitching it together is a quavering, gossamer voice that gives even the most festival-ready chorus the texture of a confession.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Paint My Bedroom Black<\/a> yearned for home, Cruel World has finally found it \u2013 shades of The Smiths here, a rush of classic Britpop there, all coalescing into her most accomplished record yet.<\/p>\n We meet at a members\u2019 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\u2019t 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. \u201cI\u2019m never going to be the loudest person in the room,\u201d she says. But words tumble out of her anyway \u2013 hesitant at first, then all at once. There\u2019s a nerdish exuberance to her; \u201cawkward\u201d 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\u2019s going to; she steamed the outfit in the corridor outside in full view.<\/p>\n Humberstone and her three sisters grew up in what she calls the Haunted House \u2013 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 \u201cultimate comfort, sacred space\u201d. Then her parents retired to Wales; her sisters scattered. She moved to London. It was a bit \u201coverwhelming\u201d. The Walls Are Way Too Thin, her second EP, arrived out of that dislocation \u2013 the sense of being surrounded by strangers, the city an alien thing pressing in from outside.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 and in doing so, she found the relics of a childhood she hadn\u2019t quite finished with. Ballet shoes. Alice in Wonderland books. Tim Burton films she used to watch under a duvet. Brothers Grimm fairytales she\u2019d devoured in the dark. \u201cI realised the ghosts weren\u2019t scary any more,\u201d she says. \u201cLike a monster I used to be afraid of.\u201d She painted her bedroom pink.<\/p>\n Humberstone arrived in the music industry at 17, with no alpha instinct and no idea how loud she\u2019d need to be. \u201cSuddenly being in a situation where you\u2019re required to have strong opinions \u2013 I was like, \u2018Oh s***\u2019.\u201d The music industry, she has found, does not welcome quiet empaths. There was, too, the small matter of a music teacher who\u2019d warned a teenage Humberstone \u2013 who already had a song on BBC Radio 1 \u2013 that she would struggle to earn a place in music college. What would she tell them now? \u201cBe a bit more careful how you speak to young people who have ambitions. The arts are a legitimate career path.\u201d<\/p>\n Having a boyfriend is embarrassing. Being in love is a bit embarrassing<\/p>\n Humberstone now has 3.6 million monthly Spotify listeners and played Coachella<\/a> on Friday, the day the new album was released. Just as she\u2019s become more confident and louder, so she\u2019s learnt to keep her label at arm\u2019s length. \u201cNo is a complete sentence,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m in control of everything.\u201d Nobody, she adds, knows her project better than she does. \u201cBecause it\u2019s my name. It\u2019s me. I just felt ready to grab stuff by the balls. Be the boss.\u201d 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. \u201cIt\u2019s almost telepathic now,\u201d she says of that partnership.<\/p>\n Her tracks are populated by the people she loves. \u201cScarlett\u201d, \u201cLauren\u201d, \u201cLucy\u201d \u2013 songs for friends, laser-sharp images of the women around her. \u201cTo Love Somebody\u201d was written for a sister going through the wreckage of her first real relationship. \u201cWhen you\u2019re in that really dark place, you can\u2019t see the silver lining,\u201d she says. \u201cThe grief you\u2019re experiencing is just a measure of the love you felt.\u201d She was listening to Joni Mitchell<\/a>\u2019s Hejira on the way here \u2013 \u201cI need to go deep into the whole discography\u201d \u2013 and notes that Prince is capable of shifting her mood from terrible to ecstatic in a single bar. Of Flyte\u2019s Will Taylor<\/a>, meanwhile, she is similarly rhapsodic. \u201cHe does it all immaculately,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m looking for the perfectly formed song, and he finds it every time.\u201d<\/p>\n Then there is Joe, her boyfriend of three-and-a-half years \u2013 a musician in Sam Fender\u2019s 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: \u201cIs Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?\u201d Well, is it? \u201cHaving a boyfriend is embarrassing,\u201d she says. \u201cBeing in love is a bit embarrassing. Writing soppy love songs is truly embarrassing.\u201d She pauses again. \u201cBut we need that.\u201d <\/p>\n On Cruel World, the soppy love songs in question are \u201cRed Chevy\u201d and \u201cDie Happy\u201d. The first finds her viscerally confident, demanding to be kissed by someone like they mean it. \u201cAt first it felt a little strange playing it to my dad,\u201d says Humberstone, \u201cbut I\u2019m 26, and having those feelings is part of who I am.\u201d The second is darker \u2013 a gothic love song inspired by Dracula and Angela Carter\u2019s The Bloody Chamber. \u201cThere is danger in love,\u201d she says. \u201cI wanted to capture that feeling of throwing yourself into it completely.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s something of that, too, in her experience of performing live. \u201cThe feeling on stage in front of an audience \u2013 I don\u2019t know of any drug that can feel that good.\u201d Of course, the music industry demands more than that tangible communion these days. \u201cI\u2019ve been told I need to get on TikTok and film selfie lip-sync videos to my songs,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s not what I thought the job would entail as a kid.\u201d The artists she grew up loving kept their distance; the only window into their lives was the music itself. \u201cThat was part of the allure,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s just not really enough any more.\u201d<\/p>\n The online world and its pitfalls are the subject of \u201cBeauty Pageant\u201d, a sparse piano ballad that Humberstone finds nakedly personal \u2013 \u201cthe most embarrassing song I\u2019ve ever written\u201d. The lyrics describe a chronically online young woman seeking validation from likes and comments. \u201cI\u2019m reading them all,\u201d she says, \u201cprobably like everybody \u2013 and we\u2019re all just avoiding talking about this thing that\u2019s messing with our mental health.\u201d She feels the trap of being a \u201cpeople pleaser\u201d, where \u201cone terrible comment can completely f***ing ruin my day\u201d. In the music industry, she adds, \u201cbeing pretty and showing up is seen as currency\u201d. She thinks those rules \u2013 requiring women to be decorative as much as talented, almost all the time and everywhere \u2013 don\u2019t apply to men in the same way. She went to an all-girls grammar school, where competition was intense. \u201cWho\u2019s the prettiest? Who\u2019s the cleverest? Who has the most followers? It\u2019s so ingrained, seeing other women as competition. You have to unlearn it.\u201d<\/p>\n Humberstone is, by her own admission, still unlearning; still trying to figure out where the songs end and the content begins. \u201cI don\u2019t know if me as a person has that much to offer apart from my songs,\u201d she says, far too self-critically. \u201cI\u2019m not the cleverest or the sharpest tool in the drawer. But I know how to write a song.\u201d She laughs. \u201cThat\u2019s what I can give.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Cruel World\u2019 is out now <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":375670,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-375669","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/375670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\u2018I\u2019m](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Holly-Humberstone.jpeg\")
\u2018I\u2019m in control of everything\u2019: Humberstone feels more confident now and has learnt to \u2018be the boss\u2019 (Silken Weinberg)<\/p>\n![\"Holly](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Holly-Humberstone-image.jpeg\")
Holly Humberstone loves performing live, but not promoting her music on TikTok (Phoebe Fox)<\/p>\n![\"Rising](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1775983210_650_newFile-3.jpg\")
Rising star: Holly Humberstone performs during the Brit Awards 2022 (Getty)<\/p>\n