Holly Humberstone has become one of the defining voices of her generation. In just five years, she’s risen from writing songs in a crumbling house in Grantham to playing stadiums with Taylor Swift, commanding festival stages from Coachella to Glastonbury, and building a worldwide community of fans who see their own lives reflected in her songs. This evolution is evident on Holly’s forthcoming album Cruel World, which marks her most confident and sonically complex project to date. A BRIT Rising Star winner, a Top 3 debut album artist, and a magnetic live performer, Holly has grown into a global force, a songwriter whose lucid storytelling and soaring choruses resonate far beyond her own walls.

Her story began with Falling Asleep At The Wheel, the breakthrough EP that revealed a young woman translating her haunted childhood home and three-sister household into vivid, unforgettable songs like “Vanilla,” “Overkill” and “Deep End.” The intimacy and precision of her lyrics marked her as a diarist of the small details that make up big emotions. That voice quickly carried her from her gothic family home to the international stage: performing “London Is Lonely” live to millions at the BRIT Awards in 2022, supporting Olivia Rodrigo and Girl in Red across North America, and releasing her acclaimed debut album Paint My Bedroom Black, written partly in hotel rooms while living the dream she had imagined as a girl.

Turning 25 and moving into a shell of a house in 2024 in South-East London that she bought in auction with her two sisters and best friend, Holly took on a new project. Getting to work on the house — which was falling apart after years of neglect — she made it her mission to put it back together. Holly painted her bedroom pink. It was a new season. Where her critically acclaimed debut Paint My Bedroom Black was steeped in turbulence and longing for home, touring the world and living in hotel rooms, Cruel World is anchored in a new sense of belonging. “Music isn’t the stressful part of my life anymore,” Holly says. “It became the anchor, the constant, while everything else was shifting.”

Holly approached writing the record with new discipline, commuting daily to collaborator Rob Milton’s Walthamstow studio and drawing inspiration from those closest to her. Holly grew up surrounded by strong women, yet recalls how girls were often pitted against each other, “It’s so ingrained in you that you have to see other women as competition. You have to unlearn this. Women are the cornerstone of my life.” That spirit shapes Cruel World, inspired both by the women around her and her partner Joe, her anchor for the past three years. Gothic love song “Die Happy” captures the reckless magic and danger of love, drawing on The Bloody Chamber, Dracula and the sense of summer tipping into autumn.

Visually, Holly has built a dark fairytale world with her sister Eleri and creative director Silken Weinberg. Inspired by childhood trinkets unearthed while leaving the Haunted House, ballet shoes, Alice in Wonderland books, and films like Edward Scissorhands and James and the Giant Peach, she reframed the ghosts of her past as something playful and magical. “Like a monster I’m not afraid of anymore, I wanted the visuals to feel like opening a dusty old book and stepping into a story.” Ballet memories and Victorian theatre sets also echo through Cruel World, paper walls and layered worlds reimagined as Holly’s own stage.

Cruel World for Holly is about claiming agency as both an artist and a woman. “This feels like my work more than before,” Holly says. “I’m in control of everything. No is a complete sentence. I just wanted to make something I’ll be proud of looking back at, something that is mine.” Holly can see the arc clearly: from the breakout Falling Asleep at the Wheel, through her acclaimed debut and intimate Work in Progress demos, Holly reflects “My eleven-year-old self would be buzzing. I think she’d say: You're exactly where you’re supposed to be”.