If you’ve ever cried at a house party while everyone around you is having the time of their lives, Holly Humberstone has written your album. Cruel World is a record about falling in love — the euphoric, consuming, occasionally completely undignified reality of it — and it’s the most fully realised thing she’s put her name to yet.
What makes it work is the tension Humberstone holds throughout. This is not a sad album dressed up as a fun one, or a fun album with a sad bit at the end. It genuinely lives in both places at once, and that’s a hard trick to pull off. ‘White Noise’ is her own words a “crying in the club song” — mascara running, everyone else having a brilliant time, completely falling apart — but it sounds like the best night out you’ve ever had. ‘Drunk Dialling’ is simultaneously horny, heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud self-aware. Even the title track, for all its longing, has a lightness to it that catches you off guard.
Then there’s ‘Lucy’, which is something else entirely and probably my favourite track on the album. A lullaby to every young woman trying to find her footing in a world that wasn’t exactly built with her in mind, it’s the emotional centrepiece of the record without ever feeling like it’s trying to be. “Blue is just a colour anyway,” she sings, and somehow that lands harder than a hundred more obvious lines would. “Behind every rain cloud there is a promise that flowers will grow.” It’s hopeful and gentle and genuinely lovely, and if it doesn’t make you feel something then we’re not sure what to tell you.
‘To Love Somebody’ is the other side of that coin — the moment the album picks up its feet and gets moving. Written after watching someone close to her go through a brutal heartbreak, it channels all of that into something you physically cannot help but move to. It’s the kind of song that earns its place on every playlist you make for the next six months.
Elsewhere, ‘Peachy’ is a quietly devastating relationship-fear ballad about being 25 and terrified of permanence — relatable to an almost uncomfortable degree — and ‘Beauty Pageant’ is the album’s most unflinching moment, a raw and honest reckoning with the pressures that come with being a woman in the music industry. It’s brave in a way that doesn’t announce itself as brave, which is the best kind.
Cruel World is an album about love being painful at its core, and it never lets you forget that — but it also never lets that weigh it down. Holly Humberstone has made something genuinely brilliant here. We have a feeling she’s about to make some very big moves.
Holly Humberstone’s Cruel World is out now on all streaming platforms.
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