Holly Humberstone has spent years writing like someone with the curtains drawn. On her 2023 debut album, Paint My Bedroom Black, she turned inward, folding worries, wishes and private emotions into the frame of a bedroom lit only by her own imagination.
Now her sophomore album, Cruel World, opens the window and lets the air in. The record looks outward at breakups, long-distance relationships, connections and the places that shape a life, while keeping the same intimate pulse that made her early work land with force. It is a shift in perspective, not a break from character, and it gives the album its shape from the start.
The album begins with a 45-second instrumental called “So It Starts …,” a small prologue that slips into a set of songs including “Red Chevy,” “Blue Dream,” “Peachy,” “Lucy,” “To Love Somebody,” “White Noise,” “Make It All Better” and “Beauty Pageant.” That sequence matters because Humberstone sounds fully in command of the terrain. The melodies are used with full confidence, and the mix of live instrumentation and electronics gives the record a lush, layered feel that keeps moving even when the songs turn inward.
“Lucy” is the album’s warmest turn, an ode to Humberstone’s sisters and girlhood. “Open your window darling, the world is in full bloom,” she sings there, a line that captures the album’s new outward reach without losing the tenderness at its core. “White Noise,” by contrast, leans country, with chimes and lap steel sitting under synths and percussion, one of the clearest examples of how she keeps stretching the palette without dropping the emotional center.
That breadth is the point of Cruel World. The review frames Humberstone as an artist who has been building a lush musical world since her early EPs, and this album extends it with a temporary run of color symbolism that ties the songs together without making the project feel mechanical. “Red Chevy” and “To Love Somebody” are the tracks singled out as ones to hear on repeat, and they help explain why the record feels bigger than its title suggests: the writing is sharper, the textures richer, and the emotional field more open.
The closing stretch says as much as the opener. “Beauty Pageant” samples the French love song “Le Coup D'soleil,” giving the album a final lift that feels both nostalgic and deliberate. Humberstone once sang, “I’m gonna paint my bedroom black,” and later, “So play a sad song DJ,” but on Cruel World she is no longer only documenting the room she is in. She is mapping the one beyond it, and the answer to where that leaves her is simple: more expansive, more assured and more fully herself.
