Holly Humberstone has tied the dark, gothic world of her new album Cruel World to the house where she grew up outside Grantham, Lincolnshire, saying the music still feels rooted in the crumbling family home she shared with her three sisters. The singer said the same old pressures now follow her into the spotlight, including the expectation that women should look polished to sell records while men are judged differently.
“I have to look nice, or my album isn’t going to sell. The same rules don’t apply for dudes,” Humberstone said, adding that “90 per cent” of the reaction to her new song and video has been positive, “but there’s always [one or two]…”
That contrast sits at the center of a campaign built around shadowy, deliberately unsettling imagery. The video for the lead single, To Love Somebody, shows Humberstone singing through a nosebleed while chased by a vampire-like figure, a look she said was inspired by a return to her family home a few years ago, when she went back to rummage through old belongings before moving permanently to London.
Humberstone said her childhood was shaped by a house that was “spooky” but also oddly comforting. Her parents both worked for the NHS and were often busy, she said, so she and her sisters ended up raising each other. “I grew up in this old, crumbling house,” she said. “There was nobody else really around apart from my three sisters and me. My parents are both working for the NHS and very busy. So it felt like we raised each other in this spooky, weirdly comforting house.”
That atmosphere is threaded through Cruel World, which is described as a collection of dark and stormy electro bangers and gothic power ballads. Humberstone said one of her earliest Christmas presents was a book of Brothers Grimm fairy tales, which left a mark long before she had a recording career. “I remember it being so unlike the stories that I was told before,” she said. “They were so dark and macabre. I had this weird fascination with them. Some of those things were so disturbing that you can’t really look away.”
The album’s look was shaped with her sister Eleri and creative director and photographer Silken Weinberg, who is best known for her work with Ethel Cain. The result extends a career that began in 2017, when Lincolnshire discovered Humberstone while she was still at school. Two years later she appeared on the Introducing stage at Glastonbury, then went on to win a Brit rising-star award, tour with Lewis Capaldi and land a UK top-five hit in 2023 with her debut album, Paint My Bedroom Black.
Now, the images that once seemed like childhood oddities have become part of her artistic identity. Humberstone’s answer to the pressure around image is not to soften the mood of Cruel World, but to lean into it, turning the house, the fairy tales and the fears of her upbringing into the visual language of the record itself.