Cruel World Holly Humberstone

• 1 So It Starts... 00:46
• 2 Make It All Better 03:57
• 3 To Love Somebody 03:58
• 4 Cruel World 03:26
• 5 Die Happy 03:50
• 6 White Noise 03:45
• 7 Lucy 02:51
• 8 Red Chevy 02:59
• 9 Drunk Dialling 03:41
• 10 Peachy 02:44
• 11 Blue Dream 03:20
• 12 Beauty Pageant 03:16
• Total Runtime 38:33

Info for Cruel World

British singer-songwriter Holly Humberstone releases her second album "Cruel World".

Cruel World follows Humberstone’s Top 3 debut album Paint My Bedroom Black and marks her second full-length release.

Written through daily studio sessions with collaborator Rob Milton, the record explores love in its many forms. Humberstone has described the album as examining the tension between pain and pleasure, and the ways in which love can be both grounding and destabilising.

Visually, the album’s world was developed alongside her sister Eleri and creative director Silken Weinberg, drawing inspiration from Victorian theatre, Brothers Grimm and childhood artefacts from the home she grew up in.

“‘Cruel World’ comes from the euphoria and pain of long-distance,” Humberstone shares via a press release for the song. “Your perception of the world around you can be completely distorted without that one person in it. There’s no fun in going out solo when the only place you want to be is wherever they are. Loving someone that much is always going to hurt a little. This is the dichotomy of pain and pleasure. Love is so painful at its core and this is the throughline of my record. This is my favourite song I’ve ever written.”

Since winning the BRIT Rising Star in 2022 and earning an Ivor Novello nomination for “Haunted House”, Humberstone has built a reputation for candid songwriting and detailed emotional storytelling.

Her debut album Paint My Bedroom Black saw her headline sold-out UK shows including Brixton Academy and Eventim Apollo, as well as tours across North America.

“Die Happy”, named BBC Radio 1’s Hottest Record in November, also appears on Cruel World and continues the gothic-leaning themes present across the new album.

Holly Humberstone

Holly Humberstone
When Holly first brought her intimate live shows to audiences in 2021, fans were already singing every word from her breakout debut EP, “Falling Asleep At The Wheel” released in 2020. A global tour followed, with sell-out shows across the USA including LA’s Roxy to two nights at New York’s Bowery Ballroom, which led to Holly being invited on tour with Olivia Rodrigo and Girl in Red across North America. It was on these trips through soulless hotel rooms from March to December last year that the 23-year-old began piecing her album narrative together. Striking themes of lost loves, family units, and the deep-set fears of youth and growing up intertwined with sparse and expansive sonic production, Holly’s “crazy” headspace led to the foundations of Paint My Bedroom Black. “I have had such a fun, crazy, challenging few years,” Holly says, “I wanted to put absolutely all of that into this album. An album is a much different headspace for me, but it is filled with snapshots of where I’ve been and where I’m at.” 

Snapshots of Holly flit everywhere from last year’s single “Can You Afford To Lose Me”, performed on Late Night With Stephen Colbert, to playing Matty Healy co-written “Sleep Tight” for VEVO, taking festivals by storm from Coachella to her debut Glastonbury performance and Reading & Leeds. Humberstone has become one of the most loved breakthrough artists for her raw, unfiltered, confessional songwriting and distinctive, can-hear-a-pin-drop vocals, picking up fans from Olivia Rodrigo to Phoebe Bridgers, Sigrid to Glass Animals and Sam Fender, and inspiring the next generation of alternative pop acts including Tommy Lefroy, Katie Gregson-Macleod, and Matilda Mann, whilst collaborating with the likes of Jack Steadman in Bombay Bicycle Club and Griff.

Finishing 2022 on a huge high, ending her biggest UK headline tour with 5000 fans singing back favourites “Scarlett” and “Overkill” at O2 Academy Brixton, the physical manifestation of her 242.6M global streams, Holly Humberstone started 2023 with her journal in hand and creative, walled off time, as she locked herself away in Rob Milton’s studio in London, to piece together the pieces of herself she felt like she left on the road, in rooms across the world. Holly has become renowned for painting a picture of a place so viscerally, being rooted in the walls and also people that makes a city liveable, where you can “get drunk with your mates and just forget about work”. From her family home in “Haunted House” to feeling lost and isolated in her London shared flat with The Walls Are Way To Thin, Paint My Bedroom Black is Holly’s fragmented and dark love letter to friends and lovers, a hideaway from the world when her fans need one.

This album contains no booklet.