Holly Humberstone isn’t superstitious. The British singer/songwriter is releasing her much-anticipated debut album, Paint My Bedroom Black, on Friday the 13th, of all dates. “I know, I know,” Holly says. “I felt like I wanted the date to have some sort of significance … I thought it would make things a bit more exciting, just to see what happened.”
Holly’s at ease chatting about her most “emotional” project and how it was shaped by an extraordinary career trajectory and transient tour life. The droll indie-pop progeny has been promoting the album, performing cosy acoustic showcases in independent record stores around the UK. The previous evening she played Nottingham’s Rough Trade and was enamoured with the city’s own local greeting, “Ayup me duck!” (“a term of endearment,” she explains).
In fact, Holly grew up in nearby Grantham — the birthplace of British conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She immortalised her creaky old childhood home in 2021’s ‘Haunted House’, but these days, she lives in London.
“It’s a bit of a random part of the UK. There’s not a whole lot going on in the East Midlands — but that’s kind of why I like it. There’s a bit of charm about it. But I wouldn’t be in a rush to come visit if I wasn’t from here. There’s not much to see, apart from Robin Hood stuff. I mean, yeah, he’s a celeb around here. He’s all the rage!”
Holly Humberstone: Pushing Back Against Internal Pressure
The Gen Z star is already seasoned at 23. In early 2020, Holly premiered as a bedroom act with the striking ballad ‘Deep End’, writing empathetically for a sister experiencing mental health struggles. She’s since had two EPs (the breakthrough Falling Asleep At The Wheel, then The Walls Are Way Too Thin) and an anthology (Can You Afford To Lose Me?), popularising her plaintive voice and poetic chronicles about family, romance and passage — all against the backdrop of the pandemic. She won 2022’s BRIT Rising Star award, auspiciously first given to Adele in 2008.
She’s also toured extensively, supporting girl in red and Olivia Rodrigo on back-to-back North American tours last year. “It’s lovely to know that they’re just normal people behind the whole song and dance of it.”
These achievements might have boosted Holly’s confidence, but as someone who struggles with “overthinking”, the idea of releasing an album is still pretty intimidating.
“I definitely do think that I put a lot of internal pressure on myself. I felt like a lot of the time I was in competition with myself to kind of be better and to move things up a gear and deliver above and beyond what people were expecting from me and go a bit more commercial — just ’cause that is usually the natural step that people would take that I thought was expected of me. I thought that’s what the label wanted and I thought that that’s what people wanted… I thought that that would make me happy, but it didn’t. I just ended up writing a bunch of really mediocre pop songs.”
An instinctive creative, she decided that authenticity was key. “I feel like I’ve put a lot of pressure on it when there’s really actually no need. As long as I’ve been truthful and honest and vulnerable in my lyrics, I think that people can connect to it. That’s the most important thing — it’s not about how it does or what happens to it after it comes out. It’s about the people that have been waiting for it and the people that can relate to me and connect to it.”
Holly Humberstone: Leaving Genre In The Rear View Mirror
Holly is often described as an ‘indie-pop’ artist. Sonically, though, Paint My Bedroom Black is amorphously ‘post-genre’, verging on dream-pop and electronica — though she began composing on piano. She harnesses auto-tune on lead single ‘Antichrist’, a self-recriminatory break-up track. She brought in her labelmate d4vd — who went viral with 2022’s TikTok alt-R&B hit ‘Romantic Homicide’ — to duet on ‘Superbloodmoon’. And she fully embraces shoegazing on ‘Kissing In Swimming Pools’. “It’s probably not what people were expecting,” she says.
In the past she has written with the likes of The 1975’s controversial frontman Matty Healy. But Holly largely made Paint My Bedroom Black alongside longtime collaborator Rob Milton — who, apart from fronting the Nottingham band Dog Is Dead, has worked with Easy Life. She calls him “a bit of a brother”. They were joined by American Ethan Gruska, who’s co-produced albums for Phoebe Bridgers and Manchester Orchestra.
The greatest logistical challenge was preparing an album around heavy tour commitments — a “really difficult” process that ended up taking a year-and-a-half. “It has been really, really hard to kind of balance it and to become inspired, because I’m away from home quite a lot more. I usually write about my friends and my family and relationships — and, not being home, I felt like I had less of that to write about, because I was around them less.”
A solitary Holly jotted down ruminations in a Notes app late at night in hotel rooms in unfamiliar places. “I’d kind of be forced to confront my thoughts.” She’d then strive to schedule recording sessions. “I really needed to get into the studio for my mental health, to just get a lot of this out and get all the feelings of guilt and stuff like that about being away from home off my chest.”
As such, Paint My Bedroom Black is “darker” lyrically than earlier outings — themes of estrangement and impermanence coming to the fore. Her favourite number, ‘Ghost Me’, a wistfully upbeat account of nocturnal loneliness on the road, “sums up the whole of the album”. She compares her life to the cult ’90s movie The Truman Show, which features Jim Carrey as a character who is unknowingly living in a surreal reality TV scenario. She sings, “Everybody’s up and left/And I can barely catch my breath”.
Holly Humberstone: Processing Life On The Road
An ambivert (she’s got both extrovert and introvert tendencies), Holly realised that her selfhood is bound up with those in Grantham.
“When you’re on tour, it’s a really busy time for me and, when I do have time to touch base with people, I’m just too exhausted. A lot of the time I don’t even have the mental energy to call my mum if I’ve got an hour.”
“I was going on my phone and seeing people back home [via social media] living my life and not being really too familiar with where I was and not being sure where to place myself in this weird alternate sort of life that I was living that I’d never experienced before.”
“Definitely, for a long time, I just kind of didn’t really recognise myself, because I was so far away from home and from my people. I feel like they ground me. I’d consider my identity is within my people back here that I care about so much.”
In some ways, she has universalised that sense of disconnection. Paint My Bedroom Black captures the existential FOMO that was exacerbated during the pandemic.
“That’s interesting,” she ponders. “I turned 21 in lockdown — and I do feel like that. There are a lot of things that maybe previous generations didn’t really have to consider that we are facing as a generation today.” That includes climate change, a concern that takes up a lot of brain space for Holly.
Holly even attributes the album’s “hints of nostalgia” to collective angst, the singer partial herself to ’80s rock — she previously covered Prince’s ‘I Would Die 4 U’ from his classic Purple Rain soundtrack as a delicate ballad with piano and throbbing beats. “I feel like that’s my way of kind of connecting to my inner-child and my old self,” she reveals. “My music is my only way of connecting with her, and connecting with who I used to be, and who I don’t really know if I identify with any more all that much.”
Holly won’t settling any time soon. First hitting Australia with 2022’s Splendour In The Grass, she’s returning over summer for the New Year festival circuit. She tells fans to “expect to have a bit of a party,” declaring, “I’m gonna play some new songs, some older songs that people should already know, and I think we just need to have fun.”
But, this run, she’s hoping for downtime, too — and finally snapping that obligatory koala photo. “I’d really love to see some koalas ’cause I was looking out for them last time I was in Australia. I was looking up into the trees the whole time we were driving around and I never saw one. I feel like I missed out. I really think that they’re the cutest things to exist. I really wanna see one and maybe hold one.”
Holly Humberstone’s new album Paint My Bedroom Black is out now.
Cyclone Wehner is a journalist specialising in hip-hop, R&B, dance music (Detroit techno!) and pop culture. She has spoken to Beyoncé, Rihanna, Pharrell Williams and a who’s who of dance music, including Kraftwerk. Cyclone has also DJed at Melbourne venues like Revolver. Her dream interview is Will Sharpe.
Twitter: @therealcyclone
Image credit: supplied