Holly Humberstone Demands Your Attention
The 24-year-old English pop singer/songwriter opened up shows for Olivia Rodrigo in 2022; now, she’s got her sights set on her own brilliant pivot towards stardom.
By Matt Mitchell for Paste –
No pop musician had a stronger emergence from lockdown than Holly Humberstone. The Grantham singer/songwriter, in less than three years, has amassed nearly 200,000,000 Spotify streams and, since, 2020, she’s shared bills with Del Water Gap, girl in red, Lewis Capaldi and Sam Fender, delivered sets at Glastonbury, Lollapalooza and numerous other destinations on the festival circuit and, perhaps most impressively, served as the opening act on Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour Tour in 2022. From being an art school student from nowhere-England to sharing a tent with Steve Lacy and Japanese Breakfast at Coachella, Humberstone has ascended to unfathomable heights. There’s something really visceral about how her songs interact with growing up tasked with balancing mental illness and lonesomeness as a creative person who’s always on the move. That driving force, that deftness of vulnerability, has turned Humberstone into, quite frankly, one of the most interesting pop artists in the world—and she’s only just gotten her feet off the ground.
Humberstone grew up with three sisters in a tiny village about 20 minutes outside of Grantham in rural Lincolnshire. Her parents held busy jobs and were away from the house often, and they didn’t have a television set to occupy their boredom—so art and music, naturally, filled that void. “Our mom is quite musical,” Humberstone notes. “She had a piano and I gravitated towards that. My parents always had an extensive music collection, and I’d go in their room and rifle through their stacks of CDs and take the ones that I thought the covers looked pretty.” Her parents had a wide, captivating spectrum of jewel cases, ranging from NME’s perennial sampler to Prince to Damien Rice to Bon Iver to Radiohead to Regina Spektor to Pink Floyd.
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photo: Photo by Constantine//Spence
