Music
From early breakout single ‘Deep End’ to her 2023 debut ‘Paint My Bedroom Black’, Holly Humberstone has steadily established herself as one of alt-pop’s most emotionally precise storytellers, known for turning intimate, confessional songwriting into widescreen pop moments. Now, with her second album ‘Cruel World’, she steps beyond the bedroom-pop introspection of her early work and into something more expansive, shaped in part by leaving behind her childhood home and navigating the unsettled transition into adulthood. The result is a record built on contrast – love and loneliness, comfort and uncertainty, clarity and doubt – held together by her ability to find detail in emotional chaos.
Lead single, ‘To Love Somebody’, opens that emotional thread with a sense of openness that borders on surrender. It frames love as something overwhelming but meaningful, precisely because of its instability. Rather than presenting romance as certainty, the song leans into its contradictions, suggesting that intensity and imperfection are inseparable. “They tell you that you feel too much / Euphoria right down to the crush,” Humberstone sings, capturing the push and pull of emotional excess with a clarity that feels both self-aware and unguarded. “It all breaks down, it always does / It all works out, it always does,” she continues, laying out the records central idea in a simple cycle – trust in love’s endurance, even with full awareness of its fragility.
Tightening that same tension, title track ‘Cruel World’ takes on a brighter, more immediate pop soundscape. On the surface, it’s one of the album’s more euphoric moments, built for instant impact, but there’s a quieter unease running underneath. Written about a long-distance relationship, it plays with the way love can distort your surroundings; how being without one person can make even the most alive, crowded spaces feel isolating. That familiar, modern feeling of being surrounded yet emotionally elsewhere sits at its core: caught in the noise of everyday life, but still detached from it.
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‘Die Happy’ shifts the register again, leaning into something more dramatic and stylised. It frames love as both exhilaration and risk, blurring devotion with something more reckless as the production swells and recedes in waves, mirroring that instability. What stands out is its refusal of emotional neatness as pleasure and danger coexist without resolution, giving the track a darker edge. That sense of instability carries directly into ‘Drunk Dialling’, which makes it more explicit. Messy, reactive and emotionally exposed, the latter captures the urge to reach backwards even while trying to move forward. The song sits in that uncomfortable space between humour and vulnerability, where coping mechanisms and regret blur together, focusing less on resolution and more on behaviour under emotional pressure.
With ‘Red Chevy’, the album pivots into something looser and more impulsive. Rather than pure outward release, it plays like an extended inner monologue, with desire, reassurance and affection all spilling out in real time. Humberstone shifts between blunt intimacy and emotional dependence, from “I could take a picture of you if you let me / Why you gotta look so goddamn sexy?” through to “I know it sounds stupid, but you’re all that I need,” before building into the more intense plea of “so kiss me like you fuckin’ mean it / and I’m yours,” grounding the track in an unfiltered sense of romantic urgency.
Standing as one of the record’s most reflective moments, ‘Blue Dream’ softens the edges and turns inward with a dreamlike, suspended quality. Driven by a smooth, propulsive beat, the track lingers in an uncertain, unresolved haze as Humberstone explores the idea of love feeling almost psychedelic, playing with the dual meaning of its title colour, where calmness and melancholy exist side by side. That tension between warmth and sadness sits at the core of the song, folding neatly into the wider emotional world of the record.
Sonically richer but still rooted in vulnerability, ‘Cruel World’ expands Humberstone’s palette without losing what first defined her sound. Together, the tracks trace a cycle rather than a straight narrative, where love and growing up rarely feel linear. The record repeatedly returns to the same emotional states in shifting forms, with each song approaching similar feelings from a slightly different angle. Humberstone’s strength lies in that repetition, with ‘Cruel World’ feeling purposeful rather than redundant, establishing her as an artist who understands that emotional clarity doesn’t come from resolution, but from sitting within the mess of it.
8/10
Words: Shannon Garner
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