Holly Humberstone Demands Your Attention

No pop musician had a stronger emergence from lockdown than Holly Humberstone. The Grantham singer/songwriter, in less than three years, has amassed nearly 200,000,000 Spotify streams and, since, 2020, she’s shared bills with Del Water Gap, girl in red, Lewis Capaldi and Sam Fender, delivered sets at Glastonbury, Lollapalooza and numerous other destinations on the festival circuit and, perhaps most impressively, served as the opening act on Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour Tour in 2022. From being an art school student from nowhere-England to sharing a tent with Steve Lacy and Japanese Breakfast at Coachella, Humberstone has ascended to unfathomable heights. There’s something really visceral about how her songs interact with growing up tasked with balancing mental illness and lonesomeness as a creative person who’s always on the move. That driving force, that deftness of vulnerability, has turned Humberstone into, quite frankly, one of the most interesting pop artists in the world—and she’s only just gotten her feet off the ground.

Humberstone grew up with three sisters in a tiny village about 20 minutes outside of Grantham in rural Lincolnshire. Her parents held busy jobs and were away from the house often, and they didn’t have a television set to occupy their boredom—so art and music, naturally, filled that void. “Our mom is quite musical,” Humberstone notes. “She had a piano and I gravitated towards that. My parents always had an extensive music collection, and I’d go in their room and rifle through their stacks of CDs and take the ones that I thought the covers looked pretty.” Her parents had a wide, captivating spectrum of jewel cases, ranging from NME’s perennial sampler to Prince to Damien Rice to Bon Iver to Radiohead to Regina Spektor to Pink Floyd.

Her dad was a poetry lover and would read to her and her sisters all the time. Those two ends of the creative spectrum wound up converging for Humberstone and propelled her into an affinity for songwriting. “I’d run home from school and just want to sit at the piano and write,” she adds. “I wrote a bunch of really rubbish songs groing up, and I just never really stopped—because it was what I loved to do. I went to quite a straight-laced, comprehensive school, and it was expected that you’d do your exams and then you’d go off to university and do law or medicine. I was a pretty average student, and I wasn’t really interested.” She was also a violinist until she was 18 and played in a symphony orchestra in Lincolnshire, but that part of her upbringing doesn’t hold water much in the scope of her artistry these days, at least not in an obvious, discernable way like language does. “For me it wasn’t enjoyable, sitting in an orchestra,” she says. “To me, music is about creating and going somewhere new. The lyrics are my priority. All I wanted to do was write songs and just create and do my own thing. [Playing violin] must help me in some subconscious way, but I hated it, to be honest.”

Humberstone was prepared to skip college and just focus on music but, once her friends started applying to schools, she began to feel left out and decided to do the same. she would get accepted into the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA) and move out. “I’d been in my little village, and it’s kind of its own little world,” she says. “I moved out and away from my sisters—who I’m really close with—and it was a pretty scary jump. I found that I became quite insular and found it really hard to make friends. I didn’t really enjoy university.” By that time, she’d already met her manager from BBC Music Introducing and was doing sessions with him, some of them back home in Lincolnshire and some of them in London. After a year at LIPA, Humberstone dropped out and decamped to a small flat in Southeast London. “It was huge and daunting and it was weird, because the only friends that I really made were middle-aged men,” she laughs. “Not that there’s anything wrong with middle-aged men, but those were the people that I was going into sessions with to write. It was strange, I didn’t really have any roots there.”

When the pandemic hit, she moved back to Lincolnshire and met her producer Rob Milton—who was also from Nottingham—and started churning out the singles that would become definitive of her rising stardom. Given the company Humberstone keeps nowadays, it might be surprising to learn that she never found much of a music community back home—likely because of how narrow her village was. She admits that she still struggles with that even now in London, but this time because of how big the pool of people has become. “In Grantham, there’s really nothing. I think people find it a bit of a joke,” Humberstone says. “There’s nothing going on there, it was voted one of the UK’s crappiest towns. It’s charity shops, thrift stores and bargain, one-pound stores—there’s nothing in Grantham. But Rob is from Nottingham and he was in a band called Dog Is Dead that were quite big around the area when I was growing up. We’d go to their concerts and, weirdly, later on I started working with him.” Milton is her main collaborator at this point, which Humberstone finds strange and perfect—that two musicians from a nowhere part of England were able to link up together and find trust and magic within one another.

When Humberstone started putting out singles in 2020, it was then that she finally saw songwriting and performing as something that she could, quite possibly, make a living out of for the rest of her life. It’s something she’s wanted to do forever, but the way her grammar school cast aside the music department and shrugged off the arts—and the fact that she didn’t grow up in London—that destiny and career path didn’t seem feasible or even accessible to her until four of first-ever singles (“Deep End,” “Scarlett,” “Falling Asleep At The Wheel” and “The Walls Are Way Too Thin”) racked up over 20,000,000 Spotify streams each. She quietly had the loudest breakout ever, and her debut album Paint My Bedroom Black solidifies that truth. But she didn’t really have much of a strong perspective on just how well those songs had done until lockdown was lifted and she was able to finally play shows.

“Everything was on my phone, I was looking at statistics,” Humberstone says. “I had no idea what was normal, because none of my friends were [releasing music]. It was all completely new to me. Coming out of the pandemic and being able to go play reasonably sized gigs was so sick. The tricky part, for me, was writing [Paint My Bedroom Black]. I felt like I had shoes to fill, I felt like I had to deliver and follow up on that stuff that had done well. It’s been a really hard process, trying to write and trying to go to different spaces. And, obviously, I’m evolving as a person, so I feel like my songwriting has changed quite a lot. I try not to overthink my songwriting as well and I feel like, once I get in my head about it, I come up with really shit stuff.”

Humberstone had looked at her songs “Scarlett” and “The Walls Are Way Too Thin” and felt that, once she entered the studio, it was her responsibility to re-capture that energy but make it better—and that mindset ended up being more of a detriment than a guidance. “It just didn’t make me very happy,” Humberstone admits. “And it wasn’t very good, to be honest. I had to scrap all of that and try and forget about that and try and think about what would make me happy, what music I wanted to make at the moment.” She has been pretty consistently on tour for the last two years, which separates her from an essential fixture of songwriting: getting to live your life away from the music. “I can’t believe that I get to even make an album, but the thing that is hard is trying to keep delivering—which is not easy, especially when I’m touring and I’m not having as much time with my friends and my social life isn’t popping off when I’m never at home,” she adds. “My whole life is doing shows, but I am really proud of the album. I’ve poured myself into it.”

In 2022, Humberstone was given the Brit Award for Rising Sar by the British Phonographic Industry, joining an elite cast of singers, songwriters and multi-instrumentalists—including Adele, Florence and The Machine, Sam Smith and Celeste. She was given the award while she was busy in the studio with the 2019 Rising Star recipient Sam Fender, as they were tracking a duet version of his hit tune “Seventeen Going Under.” “It was such a blindside,” Humberstone admits. “He asked me to sing on the acoustic version of the song, which I love. I already admire him and his songwriting, I think he’s incredible. We were recording it and we’d just finished and he was like, ‘Also, here’s a Brit Award,’ and I was like, ‘This has to be a joke, come on.’ But it was so cool even being involved in that song. I really look up to Sam and I really respect him as an artist, so that was pretty sick.”

But to be in company with folks like Adele and Sam Smith—this cohort of musicians who are Grammy winners with stadium-sized voices and stardom—can be a daunting thing. However, gaining such a prestigious, one-of-a-kind recognition is a confidence boost like no other. For Humberstone, to have her music considered in such an immense, honored way means that the work she’s put in over the last four, five years isn’t just valid, it’s being noticed. “I feel like, like a lot of creatives, I struggle with just having belief in myself,” she says. “I feel like nobody’s gonna back you like yourself. I feel on top of the world when I’ve just written a song that I love. And then, the rest of the time, I’m like, ‘Shit, I’ve gotta write another one. Oh, God, I’ve got to deliver. I’ve got to keep this up.’ I think that something I’ve learned is that it’s not a race, it’s not a competition. I can take my time with it a bit. I’d love to have a long career where I can develop and explore different sounds and, along the way, discover different parts of myself. I hope so. Everyone feels imposter syndrome, but I feel like I’ve got a long way to go.”

After being on tour for so long, you can see the perspective shift in Humberstone’s writing style on Paint My Bedroom Black. She’s not just making tunes about reflecting on her own sorrow in the English countryside anymore; she’s seen the world a few times over and has opted to make sense of her place within all of it. When you get to begin your career by writing about the first 18, 19 years of your life, it’s easier than transcribing new experiences of a life that’s affixed to a much quicker and unpredictable pace. “There’s less time to gather yourself,” Humberstone says. “I wrote the album over the past year-and-a-half, and last year was my first proper experience of really intense touring and loads of traveling—which was so much fun, it was some of the best times of my entire life. But it’s hard to get these gaps in-between shows and off days to go into the studio and try and chill out there from everything and try and write a song.”

Paint My Bedroom Black germinated from little notes Humberstone would write when she had time in-between sets and then, whenever she had even the quickest chance to get into a studio, she’d spill everything and work through the kinks. She usually writes about her friends, family and relationships with the people around her. When that circle became smaller and was shrunk down to just her touring party, her world became wherever she was in the world at any given moment. “It’s quite intense, going from place to place,” Humberstone explains. “I found that tricky, being away from my friends—because they’re the people that I usually write about. I think a lot of the album was about feeling disconnected and feeling guilt from just not being there, feeling like I was missing out on stuff. I would get into my hotel room after an overstimulating day and shut the door and it was just silent. I’d doom-scroll for hours. I think a lot of good stuff came from that, but it didn’t feel good—but, it felt good to turn it into a song. It also makes the time that I do get at home with my friends and family more special. I’m more inspired when I’m back home, because I’ve got more to catch up on.”

The sketches of Paint My Bedroom Black came together across different stretches in America and in the UK in 2022. Humberstone proclaims that the record has no coherency beyond it sounding like the inside of her head. She had two days off in New York in-between tours and Milton flew out and they recorded “Antichrist” on one day and the title track on the other. There wasn’t a sectioned period of weeks where Humberstone and Milton would hole up in a studio space and max their own creative mileage; Paint My Bedroom Black is the byproduct of scattered sessions where everything Humberstone had gathered up until each checkpoint would explode into recording. “It’s so crucial for my mental health to get in and work through stuff,” she says.

Humberstone and Milton went down to LA, a place she found isolating, and knocked out some parts with Ethan Gruska—who’s done work with Paul McCartney, SZA, Carly Rae Jepsen and Phoebe Bridgers and whom she greatly admires. While in London, she’d open her notes app and she and Milton would workshop the fragments together and, in her own words, “try and have a good time.” “It sounds obvious and cringe, but I really write my best stuff when I’m with people that I really trust. I’ts obviously taken me a little while to get it all together and, for a lot of that time, I was quite uninspired and I didn’t feel like I had anything to write about—which I’ve learned is also okay.”

The songwriting on Paint My Bedroom Black is pretty moving and awe-inspiring and evocative of that trust and patience. Humberstone has never been more in-tune with her own personal reckonings, as she’s now writing songs about navigating panic attacks (“Elvis Impersonators”), the objects of devotion and desire (“Cocoon”) and candid, energetic fits of romantic reconciliation (“Room Service”). “Into Your Room” should be a front-runner for every award. No parts of the record feel jarring or unkempt; the way Humberstone distills her own worries and confusions into perfectly paced rhythms and cadence is claustrophobic in language but not in instrumentation. There’s melancholy and hope in spades that translate in equal measure; it’s a grand, accurate and moving portrait of being a Zoomer coming of age in a busy, distanced world. And all of this comes under the glaze of a confident, vivid pastoral of dance grooves and indie rock hues.

Something about Humberstone I admire more than anything is just how engaged with and interested in her fanbase she is. She’s transformed part of her merch booth into the Fifth Sister Swap Shop, a communicative endeavor she launched during lockdown in September 2020 as a means of connecting with the people who’ve bought into her art. It’s a secondhand endeavor, in which fans can come to shows and bring old items, while Humberstone brings old pieces from her own closet that still have life left in them. Everyone is encouraged to swap with each other. “I’ve just got so much stuff that isn’t mine anymore, and I find such cool things and then I wear some of it,” she says. “I’d like to carry it on and see how far it can go, because I feel like I’ve gotten to meet loads of people [through it]. It’s nicer to me, seeing it as more of a family and more of a community than just an artist and their fans. That’s a bit gross to me. I’d rather just be friends with these people, because we have so much in common.”

The Fifth Sister Swap Shop was inspired by the connection Humberstone shares with her sisters around thrift finds, as they make a routine out of going to charity shops and trying to find old pieces of clothing for their wardrobes. “We have a collective pile of clothing that we all just borrow and share,” Humberstone says. “It’s way more sustainable to shop from a secondhand store. It was mind-blowing for me to come over to the US and go into a Goodwill, because there’s so much stuff and we don’t have anything like that here. Recycling clothes, upcycling clothes, is the best—because the fashion industry is just fucked, isn’t it? I wanted to, somehow, bring that into the merch side of things and bring it to the live show.”

Humberstone is in a league of Zoomer musicians who are making pop music that pulls some really important parallels from Y2K alt-rock and TRL-inspired bubblegum electronica. There’s something about this crop of new minds who are inspiring folks from our generation by subverting the expectations of what the pop mainstream is supposed to be. “There’s something about how brutal it is and how raw a lot of it is,” Humberstone reflects. “And unfiltered. There’s a real surge of predominantly female musicians, at the moment, who are writing really raw and honest and vulnerable parts of music that, I feel like, people are really relating to. Being completely candid in your music, I think there’s something really empowering about it.”

She gravitated towards that type of music because she was connecting deeply, on a personal level, with the heights of transparency that her peers were soaring to. People want to know everything about their favorite artists and the people who they look up to and, through music and through vulnerable songwriting, those folks are finding resonance and understanding and representation. The kicker with Holly Humberstone though, is that she wants to turn that camera back on her own listeners and know about their lives, too. It’s a unique and understated approach to the full scope of musicianship and personhood. In Humberstone’s world, music and devotion are not commodities; they are fixtures of holistic and empathetic community that span across the lives of millions. It makes the empowerment she feels when it comes to plugging so much of herself into her art all the more rewarding and massive—and it’s going to make her a star for a long, long time.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.