Holly Humberstone announces the forthcoming release of her highly anticipated sophomore album Cruel World, which is due on April 10 via Interscope Records. One of the defining voices of her generation returns with an album that captures the tension between pain and pleasure, where chaos and acceptance exist side by side. Renowned for her spellbinding songwriting ability, Humberstone has grown into a global force, whose lucid storytelling resonates far beyond her own walls. Entering Cruel World, she escapes into a dark fairytale world of her own making, where childhood relics, monsters and memory collide.
In conjunction, Humberstone unveils the album’s soaring lead single “To Love Somebody,” which is released alongside an enchanting Silken Weinberg (Ethel Cain)-directed video. Inspired by Victorian theatre, the Brothers Grimm and Nosferatu, “To Love Somebody” is a visceral opening statement for the 26-year-old. For Humberstone, love is both grounding and destabilizing. “The record explores love as beautiful and inherently painful,” she says.
Of the track, Humberstone recalls, “I wrote ‘To Love Somebody’ after watching someone close to me go through a brutal heartbreak. It’s better to have loved and lost, even when it sucks, because feeling everything is part of the human experience. Loving hard is a painful thing and there are two sides to love and they exist in the same space to me. They are all real, brutal and vulnerable experiences. This blue and green ball just keeps spinning and you learn to ride things out.”
LISTEN TO/SHARE “TO LOVE SOMEBODY” HERE
The past two years for Humberstone have been defined by repair, belonging and rediscovering talismans to her past, which were moments forgotten when she was catapulted into the public sphere at just 20-years-old. Where her critically acclaimed debut album Paint My Bedroom Black was marked by turbulence and longing, Cruel World is anchored in stability and recollection. Visually, Humberstone has built a world with her sister Eleri and creative director Silken, inspired by childhood trinkets unearthed while leaving the Haunted House she grew up in. From ballet shoes, to Alice in Wonderland books and films like Edward Scissorhands and James and the Giant Peach, sifting through her girlhood belongings reframed the ghosts of her past into something playful and magical.
Cruel World was written with a new discipline through daily studio sessions with collaborator Rob Milton and draws deeply on love (romantic, platonic and feminine). Raised among strong women, Humberstone speaks to the way girls are taught to see one another as competition, unlearning that instinct and reclaiming solidarity as survival. Gothic love songs on the record like the previously released track “Die Happy,” explore devotion, danger and desire, pulling from fairytales, Dracula and the ache of seasons changing.
LISTEN TO/SHARE “DIE HAPPY” HERE
Since emerging with her breakthrough EP Falling Asleep At The Wheel five years ago, Humberstone has carved out a world that is cinematic, visceral and unflinchingly intimate. Humberstone’s vivid storytelling has carried her from the haunted rooms of her family home in Grantham to the stages of Glastonbury, Lollapalooza and Wembley Stadium where she opened for Taylor Swift. From winning the BRIT Rising Star in 2022, receiving an Ivor Novello nomination for “Haunted House” and releasing her critically acclaimed debut album Paint My Bedroom Black in 2023, Humberstone has become known for her unflinching honesty and ability to articulate the quiet turbulence of young adulthood.
This year, Humberstone will perform in Europe for a run of intimate headline dates, tour in the U.K. this spring and is set to make major festival appearances at Coachella, Governors Ball and Bonnaroo.
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