Holly Humberstone - Cruel World Review
Holly Humberstone constructs a striking gothic aesthetic, but rarely translates that vision into a distinct sonic identity.
The British singer-songwriter’s second album arrives wrapped in carefully constructed imagery, with Humberstone promising fans a world layered in Brothers Grimm references with a sprinkle of Nosferatu gloom. It’s a striking visual world, evoking a romantic and slightly literary-infused drama. But once the music begins, the darkness promised by the album’s accompanying visuals rarely materialises. Instead, Cruel World settles comfortably into the established ecosystem of contemporary “sad girl pop.”
That’s not necessarily a bad place to be. Humberstone has spent the last few years brushing shoulders with pop’s upper echelon, going from winning the BRIT Rising Star award to opening arenas for Olivia Rodrigo and stadiums for Taylor Swift, whilst building a reputation for deeply personal songwriting that travels extremely well within online fandoms. In the streaming era, where honest vulnerability and aesthetic cohesion often go hand in hand, Humberstone has proven herself to be a natural fit.
Still, Cruel World feels like an album that knows exactly what it wants to look like, but is still figuring out what it wants to sound like.
The record opens promisingly with the aptly named ‘So It Starts…’, a whimsical orchestral intro that sounds like a pit band warming up before a vintage musical begins. As the atmosphere builds, you can almost feel a gothic misty forest growing and stretching out its vines towards you, and it feels like Humberstone is about to draw listeners into the mystical world suggested by the album’s visuals. Then the first song ‘Make It All Better’ arrives with the line “I need you like a teenager needs weed,” and eyebrows immediately raise.
Listening through Cruel World can feel a little like hitting shuffle on the highest charting tracks of this decade. There are clear echoes of Gracie Abrams’ biggest hits amongst flashes of Taylor Swift’s more recent pseudo-intellectual lyricism. Yet perhaps the most perplexing connection can be made in ‘White Noise’, which seems to have taken not just a page but an entire chapter out of The Weeknd’s musical book. Pop music has always thrived on influence, but here the references are sometimes so recognisable they start to feel derivative.
At times, you begin to recognise the algorithm before you fully recognise the artist.
Humberstone’s lyricism tends to lean heavily conversational, and there’s a sense that these songs are fragments of real-life emotional fallout. When it works, the effect can be sweet and rather moving. ‘Lucy,’ a stripped-back acoustic ballad dedicated to her sister, is one of the album’s most sincere moments, with simple acoustic guitar accompaniment under a gentle melody that doesn’t need heavy production to land.
Elsewhere, the songwriting drifts into slightly more contrived territory. On ‘Die Happy,’ Humberstone references a relationship that felt “neo-goth and grandiose,” a phrase that unintentionally sums up the album’s central tension with all the awkwardness of a Tortured Poets Department offcut. The gothic ambition is certainly there, it just rarely appears in the music itself.
In all fairness, the visual side of Cruel World has been extremely well executed. The album’s aesthetic rollout, through its styling and artwork, is cohesive and atmospheric in a way many pop campaigns fail to achieve convincingly. But that cohesion also highlights an uncomfortable possibility that the album’s supposed darkness lives more in the label’s creative direction than in its songs.
Still, there are genuine highlights. ‘To Love Somebody’ is an efficient pop single with a chorus clearly designed for festival crowds, whilst the title track ‘Cruel World’ packages post-breakup melancholy inside sleek synth production that feels built for an end-of-set encore.
The album’s most interesting moment, though, arrives with ‘Red Chevy.’ Compared to the rest of the record’s indie-pop polish, it has real texture with warmer backing vocals and a subtle Dijon-esque R&B groove. The track is enough of a gem that it even gets away with sneaking in a slightly kitsch saxophone outro. Ironically, it’s also arguably the least “gothic” song on the album, a reminder that Humberstone is often most compelling as an artist when she stops trying to match the aesthetic and simply follows the music.
Which ultimately reveals the album’s central tension. Cruel World clearly knows the world it wants to build, it has the references and the imagery. What it fails to effectively offer is a sonic identity that feels entirely its own.
Mirrorballs, pheromones, heartbreak, gothic romance, these ingredients of a contemporary pop knockout are all present. But too often, the record feels like it’s borrowing other artists’ emotional vocabulary rather than developing one of its own.
Nevertheless, Cruel World is a charming sophomore offering and remains extremely listenable. In a different pop landscape, that might have been enough. But in a “chronically online” era already oversaturated with beautifully tragic, aesthetically curated albums, Humberstone occasionally struggles to stand apart from the genre she so comfortably inhabits.
Whilst Humberstone has dreamed up a beautifully dark fairytale world, she neglects to establish a coherent voice, making Cruel World an album that exists fully in intention, but only partially in presence.