The majority of Holly Humberstone’s career has been in some form of lockdown.
Her first single, “Deep End,” was released in early 2020, shortly before the world shut down, and subsequent releases relied on the internet to spread widely.
It wasn’t until last year that she was able to really embark on her first tour, playing her own shows as well as opening for Girl in Red and Olivia Rodrigo.
The experience of being on the road was surprisingly lonely and emotional, and Humberstone turned to songwriting as a form of journaling to cope. The result is her debut full-length album, “Paint My Bedroom Black,” out Friday.
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“I wrote a lot of the album about feeling kind of disconnected from home. And I would find that I’d wake up in a new place and it would be really exciting and I’d have a really overstimulating day and I would be playing shows and meeting new people in a new city, and then I’d get into my hotel room at night and I’d shut the door, and then it would just be silent, and then I’d be left alone with my thoughts and I’d end up kind of doom scrolling a little bit on my phone and seeing my friends back at home, living the life that’s familiar to me, and I’m somewhere around in the world,” Humberstone explains over Zoom from her London flat. “And I think that going into the studio and working through all of that was kind of my way of feeling grounded and connected to them because I wrote a lot about them, my sisters, my relationships, my friends. I wrote a lot about all the people that I feel like a constant here, so that really helped.”
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Humberstone’s previous music has been characterized as somewhere between indie rock and bedroom pop, though she notes that at only 23, she’s still very much figuring out her sound.
“I’m an evolving person. I’m still trying to figure it out, trying to figure out who I am, what my place is and how I want to present myself. I honestly wake up feeling like a completely different person every day. So, yeah, the music’s going to sound quite a lot different than to the first EP that I wrote when I was 18 or 19,” she says. “I had a lot of anxiety about it not being maybe what people would expect. I think that on my last EP there were a lot of really poppy, commercial bangers, and I tried to do that again, and it just didn’t work and it didn’t make me very happy. And I ended up just taking the pressure off myself and getting out of my own head and writing real stuff and putting the truth in the songs, and then it was just a lot easier from then on.”
Humberstone can’t quite pinpoint how she got her start with music, but rather feels like she sort of fell into it. She grew up in the Midlands, in an area “where there’s nothing going on,” and being a musician would’ve been seen as a joke, she says.
“There would never be any real way that you’d legitimately have a job as a musician,” she says. “We didn’t grow up in London, so there seemed to be no sort of segue into the music industry.”
Nonetheless, her parents were extremely supportive of her passion. She describes herself as an average student who would come home every day and write songs at the piano. One day, she uploaded some tracks online, and one of them was played on BBC Radio One. The person who is now her manager called her parents to discuss a future, which they initially thought was a scam.
“They called the office and were like, ‘Does this person really exist? Are you guys a company?’” she says. “And then we met up and we went to an open mic night and I played some songs and then we just kept working together and now I get to do it every day.”
With the new album out, tour dates are on the horizon, and this time she knows she’ll prioritize taking care of herself — and carving out studio time to get it all down.
“A lot of songwriters journal and I just have never really been very good at it. I find that when I don’t have studio time, it’s not a good thing, but I feel like I kind of push stuff down. I try to suppress a lot of things until I have the time to get into the studio, and that just sort of becomes my journal time, my time to reflect and work through everything,” Humberstone says. “It’s always kind of been my safe space, my little comfort zone where I can say anything and put anything into a song.”