Holly Humberstone has announced her second album Cruel World, due for release on 10th April.
Humberstone first broke through in emphatic fashion, winning the BRIT Rising Star award in 2022 before releasing a debut album that established her as one of the UK’s most emotionally direct pop writers. Rather than rushing a follow-up, she has taken a more deliberate route this time, widening her sonic and thematic scope in the process.
Cruel World sees the 26-year-old examining love as something both stabilising and destructive. “The record explores love as beautiful and inherently painful,” she explains, leaning into contradiction rather than resolution. Across the album, intimacy and performance sit side by side, with Humberstone increasingly interested in the theatrical possibilities of pop songwriting.
New single ‘To Love Somebody’ offers the first clear glimpse of that shift. Darker in tone and more atmosphere-led than much of her earlier work, the track frames romance as something that carries inevitability as well as comfort. It’s less about confession and more about tension, holding emotion at arm’s length while letting it quietly swell.
The accompanying video, directed by Silken Weinberg, extends that idea visually. Drawing on music hall imagery, Victoriana, and modern performance tropes, it presents love as something staged, fragile, and faintly doomed, blurring the line between sincerity and spectacle.
Speaking about the song, Humberstone says: “‘In To Love Somebody’ I wanted to capture that contradiction: to love somebody is to hurt somebody, and to lose somebody. In order to feel extreme happiness, you have to know extreme sadness. That tension runs through the whole record.”
Cruel World is out on 10th April.
