Holly Humberstone: People can't connect to a pop star who's 'too polished'
The singer felt forced to compete with her female peers, until she realised the power of longevity.
You might know her as a pop star, endorsed by everyone from Taylor Swift to Sam Fender, but Holly Humberstone has a secret double life.
In her spare time, the singer-songwriter is literally a cat burglar.
"We've stolen one of our neighbours' cats by accident," she laughs, in a Zoom call from her fixer-upper in New Cross, south-east London.
"He's a tiny little black cat who's come into our garden and simply chosen us."
Under the slightest scrutiny, however, her story crumbles like a biscuit in a hot cup of tea.
"OK, we've been coercing him into the house with treats," she admits. "He's just so cute.
"But we're not trying to keep him. We literally push him out every night."
Humberstone's excuse for this feline felony is that, last year, her parents sold her childhood home in Lincolnshire , external and moved to Wales â taking her pets with them.
One, a cat called Tsuki, had even been immortalised in the song Lucy as a confidante who listens to her problems but "never judges".
"Oh, she knows some secrets!" laughs the singer. "I'm so glad she can't talk."
"We actually tried to bring her to London with us, but she's a countryside cat and she hated it so much. We had to send her to Wales where she can be free and frolic."
Her parents' relocation was disruptive for the human Humberstones, too.
Their house, a "freezing cold, falling down" property 20 minutes outside of Grantham, played a huge part in the singer's success.
Her early EPs were all written there, inspiring the "wonky sonics" of her indie-leaning pop sound. The 2021 single Haunted House is even dedicated to the "friendly" spirits who inhabited the property.
"It's a place I always felt I could go back to, to remind myself of who I am," she says.
Instead, she spent 2025 "packing up 23 years of stuff my family and I had accumulated", from her old ballet shoes and poetry books to forgotten bits of jewellery.
The process was unsettling. Already grappling with the idea of leaving childhood behind, Humberstone found herself literally throwing away her past.
"I felt uprooted. I was having some sort of identity crisis almost weekly," she says.
So she did what she's always done, and poured those feelings into her second album, Cruel World, which entered the UK charts at number four earlier this year.
"Writing these songs felt like building myself a little shield and a kind of safety bubble," she says. "There's an escapist, fantasy element to so much of the album."
Maybe that's true, but Humberstone has always had the ability to locate a song's emotional core, and the lyrics on Cruel World don't disappoint.
" To lose somebody is to know you're only human, honey, " she sings on To Love Somebody , external , soothing her elder sister as she endures an agonising break-up.
Undeterred by that heartbreak, she throws herself headfirst into a new affair on Die Happy , external , declaring: " Hit the gas, I want it fast, want it reckless ."
But the most revealing song is the closing track, Beauty Pageant , external .
Fragile and raw, it's the sound of Humberstone in her dressing room, addressing the woman in the mirror who'd "die for the applause" but who struggles with the impossible beauty standards imposed on female artists.
"That's a song that I wasn't really setting out to write," she confesses.
"Writing about other people often feels easier than turning the magnifying glass on yourself."
The lyrics, she says, draw on a "very specific" mindset she acquired at her all-girls school in Grantham.
"It was drilled into me: You're all in competition. You're only rewarded if you're the best. And if you're not, you're worthless."
The experience "really warped the way I view other girls", she says.
Musical success made it worse. After winning the Brits Rising Star award in 2022 , Humberstone found herself competing with megastars, even though her music leaned towards the alternative side of pop.
"I'm a very small fish and I recognise that, but suddenly I was in meetings being compared to all these people on my label's roster, who are on a completely different scale," she says.
"It's something I really, really struggled with in the early days and it's something I've really had to unlearn."
Nowadays, Humberstone has stopped benchmarking herself against her peers, recognising that the need for validation never fades.
"I don't think that there's a point I could get to, or an award that I could win, where these feelings would disappear," she says.
"Everybody feels like they've still got something to prove, so I'm done with setting myself goals - because then I lose sight of the real reason that I'm doing this, which is to write music that represents me, and have other people feel understood through that music."
That mindset comes to fruition in the new, expanded edition of Cruel World, whose five new songs were largely written after the original album was handed in.
"I was super proud of Cruel World and, when you've got that in your back pocket, there's room to experiment and break some of your usual parameters."
The new tracks find Humberstone embracing a new persona â more confident, more flirtatious, a little salty â with music inspired by a playlist featuring Abba, Madonna and Robyn.
The single Too Cute To Be Lonely , external is a will-they/won't-they story set at a house party.
