Holly Humberstone Says Moving Out Caused Weekly Identity Crisis

The 2021 single Haunted House is dedicated to the "friendly" spirits who lived in it.

"It's a place I always felt I could go back to, to remind myself of who I am," she says.

Last year, her parents moved to Wales and took her pets. Humberstone spent 2025 "packing up 23 years of stuff my family and I had accumulated", from old ballet shoes and poetry books to forgotten jewellery.

The process unsettled her. "I felt uprooted," she says.

Cruel World

She did what she has always done and wrote about it. "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."

On To Love Somebody, she consoles her elder sister through a painful break-up. On Die Happy, she dives into a new affair and sings: "Hit the gas, I want it fast, want it reckless."

The closing track, Beauty Pageant, is the most exposed. Humberstone sings from her dressing room to the woman in the mirror, who would "die for the applause" but struggles with the beauty standards placed on female artists.

"That's a song that I wasn't really setting out to write," she says. "Writing about other people often feels easier than turning the magnifying glass on yourself."

Competition and comparison

She traces the song's mindset to 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.

Success made it harder. After she won the Brits Rising Star award in 2022, Humberstone found herself measured against megastars, even though her music leans towards the alternative side of pop.

Back in London, the move has left a smaller mark on her garden. A tiny black cat from next door keeps visiting. Humberstone admits she and her partner have been luring him inside with treats, though she insists, "we're not trying to keep him."

Her cat Tsuki, who appears in the song Lucy as a confidante who "never judges", now lives in Wales. She hated London, Humberstone says, being a countryside cat.