Holly Humberstone on Cruel World, Childhood Loss and Why Vulnerability Beats Polish

Holly Humberstone's neighbours may want to check on their cat. Speaking over Zoom from her fixer-upper in New Cross, south-east London, the singer-songwriter admits that a tiny black cat wandered into her garden and, in her telling, simply chose her household. Pressed a little, she concedes the truth: she and her partner have been coaxing him indoors with treats. They push him back out every night, she says, and they are not trying to keep him.

There is a reason for the cat-sized hole in her life. Last year her parents sold her childhood home in Lincolnshire and moved to Wales, taking the family pets along. One of them, a cat named Tsuki, is the confidante in the song Lucy, a listener who never judges. Humberstone tried bringing Tsuki to London, but the countryside cat hated it, and she was sent to Wales instead.

The house itself mattered more than any pet. It was a freezing, falling-down property twenty minutes outside Grantham, and Humberstone's early EPs were all written there, shaping the wonky sonics of her indie-leaning pop. Her 2021 single Haunted House is dedicated to the friendly spirits she says lived in it. She describes it as the place she could always return to in order to remember who she was. Instead, she spent 2025 packing up 23 years of family belongings: ballet shoes, poetry books, forgotten jewellery. She says she felt uprooted and was having an identity crisis almost weekly.

She did what she has always done and wrote about it. The result was her second album, Cruel World, which entered the UK charts at number four earlier this year. She calls the songs a kind of shield and safety bubble, with a strong escapist, fantasy streak. Still, the emotional core is there. On To Love Somebody she comforts her older sister through a painful break-up, singing that to lose somebody is to know you are only human. On Die Happy she dives into a new romance with a reckless, foot-on-the-gas energy.

The closing track, Beauty Pageant, is the most exposed. Humberstone sings from a dressing room to the woman in the mirror, who would die for applause but struggles with the beauty standards imposed on female artists. She says she did not set out to write it, and that writing about other people is easier than turning the magnifying glass on yourself. The song draws on a mindset from her all-girls school in Grantham, where she says it was drilled into pupils that they were all in competition, rewarded only for being the best, and worthless otherwise. That, she says, warped how she viewed other girls.

Success made it harder. After winning the Brits Rising Star award in 2022, she found herself in meetings being compared with megastars on her label's roster, artists operating on a completely different scale, even though her music sits on the alternative side of pop. She says she struggled with it early on and has had to unlearn it. Today she has stopped benchmarking herself against peers, and has stopped setting goals, because they distract from writing music that represents her and helps listeners feel understood. No award, she says, would make the feelings of needing to prove something disappear.

That outlook shapes the expanded edition of Cruel World, whose five new songs were mostly written after the original album was handed in. Feeling proud of the record gave her room to experiment. The new material adopts a more confident, flirtatious, slightly salty persona, drawing on a playlist of Abba, Madonna and Robyn. Too Cute To Be Lonely is a will-they-won't-they story set at a house party. Terminally Yours picks up a couple of weeks later, when she realises she has fallen in love. Silver Sky, an acoustic ballad, was written in Nashville with co-writer Maddie Diaz, outdoors in Diaz's garden with a guitar while red cardinals sang. She says she wanted to write something that simply made her feel good.

Her mental health struggles have not gone away. Her stage nerves, she says, have intensified since Cruel World, because she feels pressure to deliver the album to the standard people expect. But she also reasons that a wrong note is fine, since audiences cannot connect with a pop star who feels robotic and polished. Perhaps, she says, vulnerability is her strength.

That vulnerability has won her millions of fans, though a hit single has so far eluded her. In May, her breakout single Falling Asleep At The Wheel was certified silver, five years after release. Humberstone learned of it during the interview. Her takeaway: keep making music that feels right, trust her gut, and accept that there is no end point, because having "made it" is probably a myth.