Holly Humberstone: World of Her Own

Holly Humberstone has escaped her haunted house.

The musician spent last year travelling back and forth from London to the Midlands to perform a rite of passage with her three sisters. They had to move all of their belongings out of their childhood home and say goodbye to it for good. Being summoned home to get rid of sentimental items because your parents are downsizing is a curiously emotional experience for anyone – but in this instance the 26-year-old alternative pop star was delving through the property that inspired her popular piano ballad ‘Haunted House’ and even appeared on the artwork for Can You Afford to Lose Me?, her 2022 compilation album. 

“Losing that anchor of girlhood is heart-wrenching and painful because that house is so much of who I am, but change is so necessary for growth. Our house in Grantham was just a crumbling mess, [with] mushrooms growing out [of] the wall,” says Humberstone. She shifts in her hotel room chair and pushes her rimless glasses up her nose with purpose. “At some point, you’ve got to let go of your childhood and take agency and realise that you’re an adult in the world.” 

There are six people in the Humberstone family, each possessing a hoarder mentality to various degrees – so Holly found plenty of treasures to get nostalgic over. There was a Brothers Grimm book of fairytales, juvenile but precious pieces of jewellery she’s brought back into rotation, a musical jewellery box with a spinning ballerina and her old ballet shoes, tattered proof of three years spent at the Royal Ballet School in London between the ages of eight and 11. As she pored over these items, she remembered who she was as a girl, before success and music. All of these soft childhood memories went into Humberstone’s second album, Cruel World, a more optimistic fantasy than the dark alt pop-rock she’s known for.  

“I had this weird epiphany, where I was like, ‘Fuck it, I can make pop songs and I actually love pink and I love ballet and this is the album that I want to make,’” she remembers. After a beat, she adds: “I hope I don’t alienate people.” 

Humberstone is video-calling me from a hotel room in Copenhagen, where she’s playing a show tonight. On this tour, she’s doing a stripped-back set, just her and smaller audience sizes, much like when she started out. I remind her of when I first saw her play on Glastonbury’s prestigious John Peel (now Woodsies) stage in 2022. She was so shy, visibly trembling on the big screens, as she sang to the daytime crowd desperate to hear tracks like the synth-driven emo-pop ballad ‘The Walls Are Way Too Thin’ and best-friend love song ‘Scarlett’ that secured her place as runner-up in the BBC Sound of 2021. She’s much more confident now than she was then but the nerves haven’t left her. “It’s a terrifying thing baring your soul, with every single person in the crowd watching your every move,” she says with a smile. In her daily life, she is not the centre of attention, she is, simply, “a beta bitch”, the quietest voice of the four Humberstone sisters. 

This has been two years of change for Humberstone. Since she last came off tour in 2024, she has finally had headspace to process experiences like collaborating with Matty Healy and MUNA, winning a Brit Award, duetting with Sam Fender, and probably most extraordinarily, opening for two of the biggest tours in recent memory, Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour tour and Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour. “Real-life responsibilities hit me when I got home,” she explains. “I did not realise just how codependent I became on everybody in my touring party. Being on stage is, in a way, better than any drugs that I’ve ever tried. A whole room of people cheering you on is such an unnatural experience. When you don’t have that, it’s like, ‘Wait, who am I as a girl, rather than this persona on stage?’”  

While living a normal life with her friends and family, she got to grips with adult functioning for the very first time. Since none of the songs on her debut album became a huge hit, her label let her figure out what she wanted to write next on her own schedule. “People just kind of left me alone and I got to cosplay as a regular human being,” she shrugs.  

A relatively cheap dilapidated house in New Cross came up for auction and Humberstone bought it. She took on the challenge of renovating it to live in with two of her sisters and her best friend Scarlett (yes, that Scarlett). They slowly figured it out together, while figuring out how to be in their twenties in London. “I’m one of four girls and I grew up in an all-girls school. Girls are everything to me – I’m such a pack animal.” 

The change of scenery infiltrated the album. “I’m somebody who’s very affected by my physical surroundings and what’s physically happening around me,” she says, when I say that Cruel World sounds optimistic, buoyant. There was the early music for whom the haunted house essentially acted as both a character and a location. Her second EP, The Walls Are Way Too Thin,was written while she was navigating a flatshare in London for the first time. Now, she’s in a girls’ house that has become a safe, loving “cult-like” space. In the video for Cruel World’s first single, the ethereal but upbeat ‘To Love Somebody’ and ballad ‘Die Happy’, Humberstone playfully references Nosferatu and 1920s cinema. With white dresses and long flowing hair, it’s all gothic but light-hearted, inspired by the fairytales and theatrical world of ballet and the stage. “I wanted the visuals to feel like this ‘cruel’ world where you can escape from the harshness of the terrifying and sad real world which we’re all experiencing right now,” she says.  

The new house was the stage for otherwise internal change. Humberstone had a series of “mini epiphanies” related to her self-esteem and power: that she had come this far, which meant something about her worthiness; that she was incredibly lucky to be in the position of making music as a career; she didn’t have to work with anyone she didn’t want to and her opinions about her own work mattered. It was fine that she didn’t want to do the LA match-making circuit for songwriters, where she experienced imposter syndrome having to write with producers and other writers: “I found it horrendous being put in rooms with middle-aged men who I’ve just met when I’m a little nervous 19-year-old and I don’t know how to connect with them – I don’t know how people do it.”  

It’s not that creating and promoting debut album Paint My Bedroom Black was an altogether terrible time, she elaborates, but her voice got lost among so many opinions. “It’s easy to think at a major label that I’m probably the one who knows least what’s going on out of all these professionals. I didn’t have the agency to own my shit. But I can take control and I am the boss,” she says. 

On Cruel World, there are multiple love songs, including the goth-pop ‘Die Happy’. Exuding Tim Burton-esque charm, it’s about her boyfriend, Joe, who is in Sam Fender’s touring band. “It’s a long-distance kind of confusing thing but we both understand and we both get it,” she says of their relationship. There is another of Humberstone’s signature songs addressed to a female friend – an endearing format that fans love – this time called ‘Lucy’. “I have high empathy levels and feel what people close to me are experiencing in a very real way – and I’ve always found it easier to articulate myself in a song than in a conversation. This is my love language; this is what I can do for you that tells you how I feel about this situation,” she says of this self-created and imposed trend.  

She has, though, learned that just because she is a public figure, it doesn’t mean the people around her want to be. “I have to be careful now not to air people’s dirty laundry – I’ve put my foot in it a few times,” she continues. In the sparse apology offering ‘Lauren’, Humberstone refers to her friend’s dad as a “piece of work”. It put a strain on Lauren’s own relationship with her father, while he has never spoken to Humberstone again. Scarlett’s ex-boyfriend wasn’t a “shit guy”, she says, “he was just a sweet boy who wanted to break up with his girlfriend and that’s fine – he shouldn’t have to deal with everyone commenting, ‘Fuck Scarlett’s ex.’”  

‘Lucy’ will be received differently by her sister, who has fully signed off on the song. Being name-checked feels like a gentler trade-off for Lucy, especially since the track is ultimately about the wider challenge of figuring out how to be a young woman in the modern world. “It’s a lullaby for any young woman who finds it hard to get the train some days or go to Sainsbury’s and do their weekly shop,” says Humberstone, “Leaving the house is sometimes even an anxiety-inducing experience for me.” 

Despite that admission, Cruel World feels easy and breezy – perhaps indebted to the time she spent supporting more upbeat pop artists like Rodrigo and Swift – especially when set against the tortured teen angst of her earlier work. The album is filled with small, daily observations and snapshots of how she’s feeling in the moment. Opener ‘Make It All Better’, a synth-pop nostalgia fest for the present, describes Humberstone on the Tube with collaborator Rob and bopping about in New Cross, while the yearning indie-pop ‘Red Chevvy’ isn’t a truthful reference to owning one, or even driving in one, unfortunately. 

“I’m trying to romanticise the mundane. I feel like you have to do that in this day and age,” she says, drifting into a daydream about her life in New Cross. “I live in south-east London… my life is not that romantic day to day: chicken bones on the floor and a trip to the Londis. There’s nothing cinematic or aesthetic about my days.” 

To illustrate this album with gothic visuals, she worked predominantly with women, a markedly different experience from collaborating mostly with men previously. “There’s no egos, everybody trusts each other and is inspired by each other. I remember having some rough times on the previous album.” Her sister, Eleri Humberstone, helped shape the creative direction. “She’s given me so much confidence to take agency in my project and to really level up.” 

Reconnecting with memories of her younger self, and working with her sister on ideas rooted in early passions, has left her grateful for her music career – suddenly the least stressful arena of her life. “I can’t believe I’m living my 11-year-old self’s absolute wildest dreams,” she says. “I’ll never forget that now.”