Messed!Up
Hailing from Grantham, England, Holly Humberstone grew up the youngest of four sisters. While her parents worked as doctors, they also encouraged art at home, with her mother playing cello and her father collecting books of poetry. In her teens, she played violin in the Lincolnshire Youth Symphony Orchestra and eventually gravitated toward pop music. Drawing inspiration from artists like Damien Rice, Lorde, Bon Iver, and others, she began writing her own songs, experimenting with recording on her father’s computer. Around age 16, Humberstone entered several of her songs into an online BBC music portal, where one of them, “Hit and Run,” garnered radio play. After high school, she studied performing arts at a college in Liverpool before returning home after a year to focus on her music.
Humberstone eventually befriended songwriter/producer and former Dog Is Dead singer Rob Milton, and together they began collaborating and developing her sound. In January 2020, she released her debut song, “Deep End.” It caught on online, and in February she joined Lewis Capaldi on tour. A cover of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” arrived that July. In August 2020, she released her debut EP, the Milton-produced Falling Asleep at the Wheel, which included the breakout title track. In 2021, Humberstone inked a deal with Interscope in the U.S. and Polydor in the U.K., then issued the singles “Haunted House” and “Please Don’t Leave Just Yet,” both of which appeared on the EP The Walls Are Way Too Thin later that year. She returned in 2022 with a pair of original singles, “London Is Lonely” and “Sleep Tight,” along with a cover of Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U.” Later that year, she released the compilation album Can You Afford to Lose Me?, which included a new single of the same name.
Early 2023 saw the arrival of the singles “Antichrist” and the D4vd-assisted “Superbloodmoon,” both of which were included on Humberstone’s first full-length effort, Paint My Bedroom Black, in October of that year. It was a commercial success, reaching number five on the U.K. album chart, and she followed it up in early 2024 with the standalone single “Dive.” Later that year, she released the compilation album Can You Afford to Lose Me?, combining most of the tracks from her first two EPs along with one new song.
Humberstone performed the early 2026 single “To Love Somebody” in New York on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon before releasing her second studio album, Cruel World, which arrived today!
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Holly Humberstone pages
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Holly Humberstone: ‘Cruel World’
