Holly Humberstone - Cruel World

Holly Humberstone’s first album worked because it knew exactly how to make a virtue of instability. The songs were all nerves. Every feeling seemed to arrive in real time, before it had really ever been properly understood, let alone tidied up. Such directness made her feel close, but it also set a trap. Once an artist has been sold as someone unusually good at documenting emotional disarray, the second album has to work out whether to deepen that instinct or get stuck performing it forever.

‘Cruel World’ is stronger when it ignores the idea that those are the only two options. Humberstone hasn’t come back reborn, newly balanced, freshly healed and ready to hand down wisdom from the other side. She still sounds uneasy, still writes like somebody who doesn’t fully trust comfort when it appears, still knows that wanting to be safe and feeling safe are completely different things. The difference is that these songs are less interested in exposing the wound than in deciding what to do with it.

It’s a much more deliberate record than her previous work, and all the stronger for it. The writing still leans hard on confession, but isn’t ruled entirely by impulse. There’s more shape here; Humberstone has got better at deciding which details earn their place. That matters on a record so concerned with chaos not as something to conquer, but as the condition you live inside. She isn’t writing from the fantasy that life has finally settled down, more that she has learnt how to build small spaces of escape within it.

That sense runs right through the album. ‘Cruel World’ is full of romance and sisterhood. It has self-belief and embraces the slightly unreal glow of someone trying to turn upheaval into a fairytale without pretending the dark bits aren’t still there. Humberstone has talked about wanting to create an alternative universe for people to get lost in, and you can hear that in the way its most open-hearted moments still carry a faintly gothic edge. Even the optimism comes with what she herself might call a slightly neggy twist.

A lot of second records by artists in this lane end up sounding either too careful or too grateful. Too careful because the edges have been sanded down in the name of growth, too grateful because the writing suddenly becomes full of perspective, closure and all the other things that tend to drain the blood out of songs. ‘Cruel World’ avoids most of that. It leaves room for doubt, spite, fear and the odd ugly thought. Those are usually the bits most worth listening to.

The production helps Humberstone find her space without ever attempting to make her sound bigger than she actually is. There’s never the sort of smoke-and-mirrors attempts at scale that turns inward songwriters into generic arena-adjacent content machines. She remains at her most persuasive when the song sounds like it could turn in on itself at any moment, even if it never actually does. That tension keeps things alive, and so does the record’s refusal to tidy up the contradictions at its centre. Pleasure and pain live alongside intimacy and distance, escape and reality meet both girlhood and the harder business of growing out of it.

There are, naturally, points where the album feels a touch overmanaged, as if the songs have been arranged with such care that they risk losing a bit of needed friction. Humberstone has never been at her best when she sounds too polished. She thrives when she sounds precise and slightly cornered. There is a difference that ‘Cruel World’ knows most of the time, but not always.

This is not a retreat from the qualities that made Holly Humberstone compelling in the first place, nor is it a synthetic attempt to broaden the frame in a way that feels unearned either. It’s an artist getting more selective and less willing to confuse disclosure with depth.

For a songwriter whose appeal once rested on how vividly she could fall apart, ‘Cruel World’ does something harder: it stays interesting while trying to hold itself together.