DANIEL W FLETCHER shirt, £350 (danielwfletcher.com). CHARLES JEFFREY LOVERBOY skirt, £400 (loverboy.net). Jewellery, Holly’s own
(Picture: Maxime Imbert)Holly Humberstone hated London when she first moved here. Her breakout song, ‘The Walls are Way too Thin’, was inspired by her first house share in Deptford where she moved in 2019 with a friend of a friend and some strangers she met online. ‘The house is full but I’m all alone,’ she sings. Millions could relate. Her new single continues the theme. It’s called ‘London is Lonely’. ‘Kind of feel like I’m living in the Upside Down,’ she sings, as electric pianos pulse moodily beneath her.
Speaking to the 22-year-old now, it’s clear that our great metropolis hasn’t won her heart just yet. ‘It’s completely bizarre to me,’ she says. ‘Like, even walking down the street is a whole sensory overload experience.’
But at least her feelings have moved from hate-hate to love-hate. Without this ‘sensory overload experience’, Humberstone, a small-town singer with oversized dreams, would not be speaking to me today. Over the past couple of years, Humberstone has channelled her anxieties into intimate alt-pop ballads that have earned more than 200 million streams and made her a rare breakout star of the Covid era. Next month she will follow Adele, Florence + the Machine, Jessie J, Sam Smith, Celeste and the rest to be anointed Brits Rising Star of 2022, about as sure a pathway to success as the record industry can conjure. It clearly means everything to her. ‘It’s taken a while for me to really, truly believe it,’ she says of the award. ‘It’s too wild to even figure out what it means to me.’ It was particularly ‘amazing’ to hear the news after what she describes as ‘a whole year of feeling a bit shitty and full of self doubt and questioning everything. To get that kind of recognition is so affirming. It makes me want to get into the studio and make more music and keep this journey building.’
Humberstone is surely one of the most downbeat singers ever to be named Rising Star (to cement her claim, she’s already duetted with the other contender, 2019 Critics’ Choice Award winner, Sam Fender). But such are the times we live in. She is part of a wave of Generation Z female singer-songwriters (Clairo, Girl in Red, Jensen McCrae, Phoebe Bridgers…) who write alt-pop on laptops in their bedrooms, all bleary electronics, irresistible hooks and highly specific, highly relatable lyrics about anxiety, heartache and fear. Her aim is to write the sort of lines that her fans get as tattoos. But in conversation, she proves brighter, breezier and chattier than I had imagined. Humberstone is in a happy place: spending all day posing for ES Magazine has taken her back to childhood days, larking around with her three sisters, Lucy, Eleri and Emma, with whom she is extremely close. ‘We used to dress up all the time growing up. It’s kind of another way of telling the story isn’t it?’
Her style icon is Helena Bonham Carter, apparently in Bellatrix Lestrange mode. ‘I’m not a very confident person. Like, in front of a camera I kind of just freeze up and become very awkward. So I try and channel Helena Bonham Carter and be a bit witchy.’ Her hair is testament to that. When she performed on The Tonight Show in the US recently, she looked like she’d just emerged from a period of social isolation only to be caught in a rainstorm. I reckon it could start a trend. ‘I mean I think as you can probably tell, I’m kind of a bit of a chaotic person,’ she says. ‘I’m always a little bit bedraggled when I’m going about my daily life. I’m always a little bit late and a little bit flustered. So I feel like it kind of probably is exactly what I look like anyway, you know?’
Humberstone grew up in Margaret Thatcher’s home town of Grantham, Lincolnshire, the second-youngest of four sisters. She also went to an all-girls school and admits she’s not used to spending lots of time with men. Childhood sounds idyllic — a rambling old cottage; three ‘automatic soulmates’ in her sisters; music-loving parents who let the girls get on with whatever they wanted. It sounds like a children’s novel, I remark. ‘Little Women?’ she shoots back. ‘Yeah we get that a lot.’
After her house share in Deptford became unbearable during the early months of the pandemic, she returned to Grantham — but she is now back in south-east London again, sharing a flat with an elder sister and slowly finding her feet. She found herself being rude to someone standing on the wrong side of an escalator recently, which must count as progress. ‘I was like, “Oh no! I’m becoming everything that I hate about this place.’”
But still, she feels a fish out of water. ‘I definitely don’t feel mature enough to be here,’ she says. This a theme she returns to a lot: ‘I mean, I’m literally 22!’ But each time she says this, I can’t help thinking that 22 isn’t that young. Dua Lipa moved from Kosovo to London on her own when she was 15. Lauryn Hill had recorded The Miseducation of… at that age. Isn’t 22 some way into being a fully fledged grown-up adult?
‘I should be more responsible and ready for adulting but I’m just not!’ she laughs. ‘I feel like a 14-year-old. I think it will never change. I feel like Peter Pan or something. I’m supposed to be an adult now and I’ve just got no clue. Like there’s not a f***ing chance I’m going to be able to survive in the adult world you know? You don’t really get taught these things at school, one day you just get pushed out of a door and you have to just survive.’
Then again, Humberstone’s ambivalence about adult life is hardly unique. Indeed, it has become characteristic of Gen-Z songwriting: see Olivia Rodrigo’s megahit ‘Driver’s License’; or Phoebe Bridgers’ protegée Claud singing: ‘Getting older’s getting scary.’ In any case, Humberstone sees the cardinal virtue in her songwriting as honesty. What matters is that you tell your truth, no matter how messy or unflattering. ‘I feel like there’s been a really cool trend over the past few years — probably over the pandemic — of young female artists releasing deeply personal and exposing music,’ she says. ‘Like way oversharing. I’m not really going through anything particularly unique and neither are any of these other girls. I’m just writing about really universal stuff that everyone can relate to.’
Her songs are her way of processing these feelings. She is not the first person to move to London and find it cold and alienating. She has also written songs about her sister’s depression and the end of her first ‘proper’ relationship, ie her first boyfriend ‘that wasn’t like a high-school boyfriend or something like that’.
‘The studio really is my only constant safe space that I know I can go back to no matter how weird and confusing everything else in life is,’ she says. ‘It’s just the best feeling ever, turning something painful into a song that I love and that is a piece of art to me. I just live to do it. It’s my favourite thing.’
Besides, she says, Gen Z have a lot to get off their chests. ‘I know I have been very lucky and privileged but I do feel we’ve been through a lot as a generation. Especially with the global pandemic. I think that’s the reason that a lot of our music is so personal and so introspective and oversharing.’ I wonder how much that has to do with growing up on social media? Sharing intimate details with strangers is, in many ways, the water that she has always swum in.
‘I guess so,’ she says. ‘But a lot of people who didn’t grow up with social media don’t realise that it’s not natural to everyone in my generation. Social media is still an intensely anxious space for me even through I’ve grown up with it. I really didn’t realise that when I signed up to be a musician, you have to be posting and sharing so much of yourself. You basically have to be an influencer or something. It’s so invasive.’
Most of the pressure she feels around her music is self-imposed; she stresses she is in agonies about which songs to include on her debut album. But it sounds like the pressure to dominate the platforms, increase engagement and improve numbers is coming from her record label, Polydor. ‘I know to a lot of people social media can be a safe community. But I know that for a lot of us, it’s just pure anxiety. And we have to do it all the time… I wish I could just release the music and just let it be that but it’s not like that.’ While touring last year, she did have the chance finally to break out of the bubble, and to meet the other fledgeling pop stars who had emerged during lockdown, such as Baby Queen and Gracie Abrams. ‘We kind of had interactions on social media throughout the pandemic but it felt competitive, like there was some kind of tension between us because we didn’t really know each other. But then we met each other in the summer and all hung out. You realise that you’re all in the same position. One of the lonely things about this job is that nobody apart from each other can really fully understand what it is that you’re going through.’
She will have plenty more time on the road this year, supporting Norwegian bedroom pop star Girl in Red and then Olivia Rodrigo on arena tours this spring. ‘These are two artists who have been inspiring me the past two years, so the fact that I get to go and even watch their show is going to be amazing,’ she says. In the middle of that comes Coachella in California, where she is on the same bill as Billie Eilish.
Already, she has built up a large following in the United States. In Los Angeles recently, fans asked her to write her lyrics on their skin so they could indeed get them tattooed, which she finds a little unreal.
‘I’d always wanted to go to America for music. I set that milestone in my head when I was 11. I’ve just been really, really lucky that throughout the pandemic, somehow I’ve been able to connect with people over there. But it’s still beyond me that on the other side of the planet people are listening to my music and connecting with my stories. It’s so bizarre but it’s just lovely.’
The pressure isn’t going away, though. Let’s say she did completely mess up at the Brit Awards and the whole thing disappeared. What would she do then? She laughs and then looks a little concerned.
‘This is all I’ve got. This is all I’ve got. I don’t know what I’d be doing.’ This is all I care about. This and my family and friends. So I just — I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t do this.”
Holly Humberstone photographed by Maxime Imbert.
Styled by Jessica Skeete-Cross.
Make-up by Terry Barber at David Artists using MAC.
Hair by Mike O’Gorman at Saint Luke using Wella Professionals.
