Cruel World grew out of a house clearance. When Humberstone’s family sold the Grantham home she’d grown up in, she spent weeks sifting through ballet shoes, fairy-tale books and pieces of herself she’d misplaced during years on the road. That process gave this record something Paint My Bedroom Black could rarely find: a reason to stay still.
Rob Milton’s production is restrained throughout. The arrangements never crowd her, which means when something does push forward, like the bassline on ‘Die Happy’ or the strings on ‘Beauty Pageant’, it lands with more weight than it might otherwise have. I find this kind of discipline more interesting than I used to. There’s a confidence in not filling every gap.
‘Die Happy’ builds slowly and when the third chorus comes it doesn’t explode, it just fades, and that’s the moment I keep coming back to. ‘Lucy’, named after her sister, is even simpler: acoustic guitar, a voice that barely lifts off the ground, and a lyric that quietly fulfils itself. “Anywhere you go, there is a chorus of angels following close” and then her own layered harmonies become exactly that. It’s a small thing that lands hard.
‘Beauty Pageant’ closes the album and it’s the one that stays with me. It opens on a sparse, delicate piano melody before strings arrive and it builds into something close to a ballad. The production underneath has a glitchy, unsettled quality, with Humberstone writing about beauty standards and social media and the grind of being looked at. “You’re not in the Midlands anymore, I click my heels and wish for home.” It loops back to the house she cleared out before any of this started.
The mid-album is where I start to lose the thread a little. ‘Red Chevy’ has an energy the record could use more of but the saxophone sounds borrowed, Antonoff-adjacent in a way that doesn’t suit her. ‘Drunk Dialling’ is a decent synth-pop song and I enjoy it well enough, but it could have come from a handful of artists doing similar things right now. ‘White Noise’ arrives and leaves without making much of a mark on me.
None of that undoes what’s good here. Cruel World is Holly’s best record, more rooted and more honest than anything she’s made before, and I think it’s going to sound even better in six months when the singles have settled and the album tracks have had time to breathe. Whether her careful, controlled approach is confidence or caution is still an open question for me. The distance between ‘Beauty Pageant’ and ‘Drunk Dialling’ suggests there’s a bolder album waiting for Holly somewhere. She sounds close enough to find it.
