Holly Humberstone: identity crisis after selling her childhood home and the expanded edition of Cruel World

A lost home and a 'weekly' crisis

British singer and songwriter Holly Humberstone, known for supporting Taylor Swift and Sam Fender, told BBC music correspondent Mark Savagethat in 2025 her parents sold her childhood home in Lincolnshire and moved to Wales, taking the family pets. She described the house, 20 minutes from Grantham, as 'freezing and falling apart', but it was where her early EPs were written, and her 2021 single Haunted House is about the house's 'friendly' ghosts. The singer spent a whole year sorting through '23 years of stuff' her family had accumulated — from ballet shoes and poetry notebooks to forgotten trinkets. 'I felt uprooted. I had a kind of identity crisis almost weekly,' she admitted. Her cat Tsuki, immortalised in the song Lucy as a silent confidante, was initially taken to London, but the 'country' cat failed to settle in the city and was sent to Wales. Incidentally, in the same interview Humberstone joked that her family 'accidentally stole' a neighbour's cat — a small black cat that wandered into their garden in the London district of New Cross on its own.

How the experience became an album

These experiences formed the basis of her second album Cruel World, which entered the UK charts at number four this year. 'Writing these songs felt like building myself a little shield and a kind of protective bubble,' the singer explains. The album also contains specific stories: in To Love Somebody she comforts her older sister after a painful breakup,in Die Happy she throws herself into a new relationship, and the closing track Beauty Pageant is the most candid: it is a conversation with her reflection in a dressing-room mirror about the unattainable beauty standards imposed on women in the industry. Humberstone links these lines to her experience of attending a girls' school in Grantham: 'It was drilled into me: you are all competing. Only the best get the prize. And if not — you are worthless.' She says this 'genuinely distorted' how she perceived other girls.

Comparisons with megastars and giving up on goals

Winning the Brits Rising Star award in 2022 — past winners include Sam Fender, Florence + The Machine and Adele — sharpened the problem. 'I'm a very small fish and I know it, but suddenly I found myself in meetings where I was compared to people on my label's roster who operate on a completely different scale,' Humberstone said. Now, she says, she has stopped measuring herself against her peers: 'I don't think there's a point or an award at which those feelings go away.' She has given up setting goals so as not to lose the 'real reason' — making music that represents her and in which others recognise themselves.

Expanded edition and a new image

An expanded edition of Cruel World is in the works with five new songs, written mostly after the original album was handed in. 'I was really proud of Cruel World, and when you've got it in your pocket, there's room to experiment,' the singer notes. In the new tracks she tries on a more confident and flirtatious persona, inspired by a playlist featuring Abba, Madonna and Robyn. The single Too Cute To Be Lonely is an on-off story at a house party,Terminally Yours describes falling in love within a couple of weeks, and the acoustic ballad Silver Sky was born in Nashville in the garden of her co-writer Maddy Diaz to the singing of cardinals: 'I usually write a lot about mental health struggles, but I wanted to write something that makes me feel good.'

Stage fright and 'silver' five years on

Humberstone stresses that her mental health struggles have not stayed in the past: stage nerves have only intensified since the release of Cruel World, because it is the work she is proudest of, and she felt a pressure of responsibility towards her listeners. 'People can't connect with a pop star who seems too robotic and polished. So maybe my strength lies in vulnerability,' she reflects. Meanwhile, her audience keeps growing: this May, her debut single Falling Asleep At The Wheel went silver — five years after its release, a testament to the longevity of her songs in an era of disposable hits. Tellingly, the singer learned about the award right in the middle of her BBC interview. 'If I'm going to keep doing this, I just need to keep making music that feels right, trust my intuition and accept that there is no finish line,' she concluded.

Image source, Silken Weinberg

Image source, Holly Humberstone

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Silken Weinberg

Image source, JME International