Holly Humberstone returns with highly anticipated 3rd album ‘Cruel World’
The pop singer releases an otherworldly 12-track album — and it will end up on your playlist.
★★★★★
Photo: Silken Weinberg
Cruel World is the second studio album by rising pop artist Holly Humberstone, and is out now via Polydor Records. The highly anticipated album comes three years after Humberstone’s previous release and ahead of an upcoming world tour, kicking off with a U.S. leg later this month.
The album opens with So It Starts, a 40-second string introduction to an album that lives in its own fantastical, sad and romantic world. The music leads into the album’s first full-length track, Make It All Better, using a simpler version of its melody. Make It All Better pulls listeners right back into Humberstone’s overtly emotional sound that gained her so much love three years ago. The track is an ode to a long-term and uncomplicated kind of love, with Humberstone singing, “If you have a bad dream / I wanna make it all better / If anybody hurts you / I wanna make it all better.” With layering, dynamic vocals and vividly atmospheric production elements, the track is the true start of a new evolution of the sad-girl pop sound.
The track is followed by To Love Somebody, another love song, this time speaking to the value of experience and learning from mistakes, as well as the danger of taking all of the advice that’s given. With lines like “It all works out (it always does)” and “At least you got to love somebody,” simple yet impactful against a bright pop background, the track shows what Holly Humberstone does best: taking universal concepts and turning them into sunlight and hair blowing in the wind. The track was released at the beginning of this year, along with a music video, which contains silent film-inspired scenes of Humberstone going out with and subsequently running away from multiple monsters and ominous shadows.
The album’s title track, Cruel World, frames the record’s larger storyline with the sentiment of missing someone that you hardly have. Describing always getting left in the dust by someone you’d rather do everything with, Humberstone ends the track with its most telling lines: “Take off your shoes and stick around for a change / It could be real cute if this time you stayed.”
A happier sentiment is created by the album’s first single Die Happy. Humberstone writes some of her best lines for this step into her world, including the song’s chorus: “And if we crash and kiss the dash / Baby, tragically / To die with you is to die happy.” Humberstone takes on a light and angelic tone in this track, choosing to focus on all of the small, sweet moments that make up the reasons for falling in love: “There’s something about you / So strange and beautiful / Two shadows on a wall.”
White Noise is the epitome of the sad going-out song so many of us crave. Humberstone’s serenely sombre vocals singing the lines “Sometimes the busiest places / Can make you feel so alone / So play a sad song, DJ / I just wanna sway tonight” is the perfect cathartic backdrop for crying in the club bathroom and dancing alone.
The album’s seventh track, Lucy, takes on an acoustic sound to express all of the expectations that are placed on young women to grow up and figure themselves out. The chorus of this track flows into a new, fantastical territory, with lines “Behind every raincloud / There is a promise that flowers will grow” combined with a “chorus of angels” behind. The song is a reset, holding its own unique footing in the album’s progression.
Humberstone follows up Lucy with Red Chevy. A complete change in tone from the previous track, Red Chevy is dark and heavy, with vocals quiet and straining all at once. While singing “Kiss me like you’re fucking me,” the singer builds another story of a relationship taking substantially more than it gives.
Drunk Dialing follows, coming back to a piece of the timeline about all the different ways we deal with being alone. Many of Humberstone’s songs, like this one, find their power in the everyday, latching onto the small feelings and reminders of the past that we so easily sweep away and prying them open for all of their beauty and tragedy.
The last segment of the album begins with Peachy, a track about still feeling young and small, and fearing the emotional baggage that will hurt the most inward version of you. Humberstone pleads, “Don’t put your faith in me”, for fear of screwing it up. The song’s chorus, “If it’s peachy now / Let’s not talk out loud / And nothing bad could ever happen,” describes the walking on eggshells that occurs when the honeymoon phase with an untrustworthy partner comes to an end. Peachy is a striking highlight of the album, digging into the deepest parts of a relationship that you thought you always wanted.
Blue Dream is one last increase of energy, framing little unsettling moments of a relationship into a deceptively pop-y groove. The album ends with Beauty Pageant, slowing everything down into an emotional piano ballad about the girls we idolise. Humberstone once again breaks down every perceived wall between writer and listener with her lines, “Twenty five / Still alive / You’ll find me chronically online,” closing out all of the album’s storylines with the monologues that happen within, even more to do with ourselves than they are with others.
The end of Cruel World is haunting and beautiful. Humberstone’s angelic vocals and satisfyingly relatable lyrics and stories all tie together to make an album irresistible to every young person struggling to figure out what they want, how they can be loved, or even just how to be perceived as pretty. If any pop album was worth a three-year wait, it’s this one.
Cruel World is out now via Polydor.