The duality of Holly Humberstone

Holly Humberstone has been living a double life. Or at least, that’s how last year felt to the East Midlands-born, London-based musician. After winning the BRIT Rising Star Award, she embarked on two back-to-back American tours – first with Girl In Red, then Olivia Rodrigo – before playing Coachella, Primavera and Glastonbury (the holy trinity of festivals) and then heading off on her own international solo tour, following up 2021’s critically acclaimed The Walls Are Way Too Thin EP with a slew of singles in the process. It’s exhausting just hearing about it. “It was quite a hectic year,” 23-year-old Holly tells me from the home she shares with one of her three sisters in New Cross, south-east London. “I was loving the shows but then I’d get back to my hotel room on my own and it was completely silent and I’d feel really depressed. I’d just go on my phone and doomscroll and see all of my friends having fun together. So one side of my life was popping off and going really well, but the other side…” Holly pauses, collecting her thoughts. “I was neglecting all of my relationships and just felt really out of touch with everybody. I felt like I was living some sort of a weird, fake existence for a lot of last year.”

When Holly did have the occasional day off, she holed up in studios across the US and unleashed her feelings. “When I’m touring I don’t really have access to a piano or a guitar unless I’m on stage, so usually by the time I get to the studio, I’m just so desperate to get everything out,” she says. “When everything’s a bit confusing and overwhelming, having my writing time is the only thing that brings me back down to Earth and back to myself. It grounds me.” The result of those sessions and that lifestyle is Holly’s highly anticipated debut album Paint My Bedroom Black, due out on 13 October. It’s named after the yet-unreleased opening track of the record, one on which Holly’s lyrics manifest positive, powerful change. “For me, the title summed up quite a lot of the album.”

Paint My Bedroom Black is an addictive collection of 13 songs in which Holly candidly offers up both sides of herself for the first time. It’s considered, polished, and more mature but still as sonically moody as her past work. Like Holly herself, it contains multitudes. Earlier this month, along with the album announcement, fans were treated to the double A-Side singles “Antichrist” and “Room Service”. The former is an impossibly catchy break-up ballad full of guilt, self-loathing and, as she puts it on the hook, “bad love” on her part. “It was a bit of a one-way street,” she says, “just being insufficient, not being enough for somebody who deserves better. I was kind of kidding myself that it was gonna work; that I liked this person enough to be able to hold it down along with my career. Writing that song helped me come to terms with the fact that we needed to break up.”

Holly and her team shot the accompanying music video in a “definitely haunted” abandoned war hospice in the Czech Republic. In it, we join our protagonist as she questions her reality, tries to escape herself and performs on top of a smashed-up car that stands vertically in the middle of a room. “It was about 4am and I was sitting on top of this car with broken glass all around me, just trying to balance,” she says. “It was worth it though.”

“Room Service”, meanwhile, is at odds with the introspective destructiveness of “Antichrist”, instead capturing the longing that comes with new love: making plans, missing each other’s bodies and carving out a safe, secret space together. “I’ve started a new, exciting relationship and it’s something I’ve written quite a lot about,” Holly tells me. “Writing certain songs actually really helped me to find a system that works with this person, so it’s been really nice.” Her partner works in a similar field so is familiar with the demands of her job, she tells me; they have a rare understanding.

Out today, the harmony-laden “Superbloodmoon” featuring Houston teen d4vd, is another of these long-distance love songs. Drawn to collaborate with the 18-year-old gamer-turned-TikTok favourite because of “how gritty his lyrics are – I really like that,” their disparate voices interestingly complement one another’s. “There’s a line that goes, ‘I saw a super blood moon in the sky, can you see it from where you are?’ that I had that in my notes for ages,” Holly says. “That song is also about my new relationship – he was also travelling and touring and whenever I’d be home for a few days, we’d get like, a single day together before both going away again. It felt like we were ships passing in the night, so I wanted to write a song about that; about feeling disconnected and I guess like we could connect through looking at the same sky.”

The rest of the record is just as emotionally up and down. “I feel like the album is split into two halves in my head, which I didn’t really see until after it was completed,” Holly says. “One half feels like my day-timey, extraverted self where I’m proclaiming my love for everyone, then the other side is wanting to shut the world out and stop everything. Listening through, it’s so clear to me now that there are these two versions of myself.” Rather than arranging the record thematically though, “it’s kind of all mixed in together, which represents the emotional journey that I went on last year,” she says. “A lot of these songs are about yearning for home and feeling lost and having a bit of an identity crisis; trying to navigate relationships from far away.”

One of these relationships is explored on “Elvis Impersonators”, a beautiful, cherry blossom and private joke-flecked ode to her little sister, who moved to Tokyo last year. Holly is currently counting down the days until mid-August when she’ll play Japan’s Summer Sonic festival and they’ll be reunited. Then there’s “Lauren”, written for her best friend, on which Holly expresses the guilt she feels about being so unavailable. “I already sent it to her and she loves it,” she says. “When I write a song about a person, I feel like I have to explain it first, so they’re not shocked when they hear it.” Did she also give a heads up to the person at the heart of “Flatlining”, a pulsating track in which the tempo switches up as she lays out, in detail, the highs and lows of a situationship? “Oh no, I won’t be doing that,” Holly laughs. “I think I’ll leave that one to the Gods. The chorus line is ‘we just can’t be friends anymore’ but we actually are friends again, so it’s okay… just a bit awkward.” She’s dreading having to perform that one live. “I love it but the person that it’s written about will definitely know it’s about them because it’s exclusive to that situation, so that will be a bit scary.”

“There’s basically a lot going on on this album,” Holly says with a smile. “But for me it just tells the story of last year.” With a lot of electronic-based music in her discography, Holly was keen to make this release “a bit more band-y sounding” and so, along with longtime collaborator Rob Milton, she called on producer Ethan Gruska (Phoebe Bridgers, Ryan Beatty) to lend his touch. “I was able to work with one of my musical heroes,” she says. “I was out in LA and was a bit overwhelmed by everything there so I decided to reach out to Ethan. It wasn’t through our labels or anything, we just DM’d and ended up collaborating on ‘Lauren’ and also a song called ‘Into Your Room’. There’s nothing more disheartening than doing sessions and not getting anything out of them; feeling like you’ve forgotten how to write when that’s your one job. I remember going to Ethan’s studio and it just being like a breath of fresh air.”

As she mentally prepares to release Paint My Bedroom Black — which will undoubtedly cement her as one of the UK’s most exciting new popstars — Holly reflects on how far she’s already come. “I’ve had to mature really fast,” she says. “I’ve learnt more about myself and how far I can be pushed without needing breaks; how to look after my mental health on tour; how to be a bit more independent.” But as well as an album and fame, this period has also given Holly the assurance that, despite all of the tough moments that come with it, this is exactly what she wants to be doing. “I’ve learnt what I want for the future and the more I get to do this music stuff, the more I know how much I’d love to do it for a lot longer. The more I’ve been able to have these incredible experiences, the more ambitious I’ve become.”

How then, will she gauge the success of Paint My Bedroom Black? Having ticked off so many career markers already, what are Holly’s current goals? “My version of success for this album was always to create something I believe in, something that I’ve really poured all of myself into, and that’s what I’ve done,” she says. “I want to be able to look back, when I’m a granny, at this first album and my career and just feel like I’ve told my story, you know? I never even thought I’d be in the position to make an album and release it… so now I just hope that someone, somewhere, will listen to it.”

Pre-order Holly Humberstone’s debut album Paint My Bedroom Black, out 13 October 2023, here. Get tickets to her EU tour this September here.

Credits

Photography Glynn Parkinson