Holly Humberstone's second album Cruel World will "explore love as beautiful and inherently painful"

The record, which follows her 2023 debut Paint My Bedroom Black, will release on 10 April and is described by Humberstone as being “anchored in stability and recollection”.

The 26-year-old songwriter says the material draws deeply on themes of love—romantic, platonic, and feminine—exploring its dual capacity for grounding and destabilising. “The record explores love as beautiful and inherently painful,” Humberstone explains. “In To Love Somebody I wanted to capture that contradiction: to love somebody, is to hurt somebody and to lose somebody, well at least you got to love somebody. In order to feel extreme happiness, you have to know extreme sadness. That’s the tension of the record.”

The creative direction for Cruel World was shaped by sifting through childhood belongings after leaving her family home— the ‘Haunted House’ that inspired her early work. Working with her sister Eleri and creative director (and Ethel Cain collaborator) Silken Weinberg, Humberstone built a visual world inspired by unearthed trinkets, Victorian theatre, and gothic fairytales. This aesthetic is present in the Weinberg-directed video for “To Love Somebody”, which takes cues from Brothers Grimm and Nosferatu.