“Time to get real, girl, you’re not in his arms anymore,” sings Holly Humberstone on her sophomore studio effort, Cruel World. Although it would be easy to categorize the record as a breakup album—there are too many references to past relationships to count—it would be better described as a front row seat to Humberstone growing into her own sound.
The singer made her name with somber, alt-pop numbers that speak to the modern adult experience, specifically on her aptly titled debut, Paint My Bedroom Black. The equally appropriately titled Cruel World doesn’t necessarily come to terms with the idea that the world is, in fact, cruel. Rather, it reckons with Humberstone’s place in it, and by extension all of ours, with a distinct ring of hope running through the track listing.
The LP opens with “Make It All Better”, a wishful sentiment we all yearn for in the current era, one where the world can no longer be made all better with a song. Still, Humberstone tries it anyway, yearning to grow old with someone: “I wanna be old and gross with you, matching tracksuits on a treadmill.”
It’s a wish that doesn’t exactly survive by the succeeding track, the second single “To Love Somebody”, which attempts to bridge the divide between who we once were and who we are now once a special person is no longer in our lives: “To love somebody / To hurt somebody / To lose somebody / Is to know you’re only human, honey.” Humberstone is known for an unabashed display of human emotion in her work, and Cruel World takes it to new heights.
As much as it’s steeped in its own sadness, the realm that Cruel World occupies is also as happy as a world like Humberstone’s can get. Indeed, as she waxes poetic about how cruel the world truly is without her former love on the title track, she’s right back in the thick of feeling everything all at once on “Die Happy”, the record’s lead single: “So hit the gas, I want it fast, want it reckless / Now all that matters is your name on my necklace.”
To live inside the singer’s cruel world is to embrace every side of ourselves, whether it’s wistful and depressive one moment and driving off the deep end (no pun intended) the next. A particular standout on the album is “White Noise,” which encompasses everything Humberstone holds dear on Cruel World: dancing it out in spite of being sad.
“Red Chevy” and “Drunk Dialling” are equally as representative of the album’s core themes, knowing full well that being both happy and sad simultaneously is one of the last forms of authentic human expression. She throws caution to the wind on the former, arguably the happiest song on the record, lamenting her obsession with someone sexy. Then, like clockwork on the latter, Humberstone is back to her old self: “I’m gonna put my New Rocks on and get into the groove / I should’ve been your baby doll / But, sugar, I was born to lose.” As she constantly oscillates between these two shades of herself, the singer holds true to the fact that with light comes inevitable darkness, and perhaps that’s the world’s cruellest trick of all.
Cruel World‘s best track, however, is the closer “Beauty Pageant”. Coming to terms with the impossible beauty standards placed upon women, which have only increased in the digital age, Humberstone also takes a hard look in the mirror, referencing a 25-year-old woman who would die for the applause. She hums over the chorus about being too young and too sad to understand the complexities of expectation: “I’ll strike a pose, I’m ready / Come on and make me pretty.”
Among her many talents, second-guessing herself is the one that makes Holly Humberstone’s music the most relatable. She blends this masterfully with the short attention span of a fickle business: “So I dance till I drop / Pull on my strings and wind me up / I’ll be your favourite, till I’m not.” Although she ends the album on a signature sad note, Cruel World still has a promising tone that shines through the clouds. In “To Love Somebody”, as Humberstone puts it, “It all breaks down, it always does / It all works out, it always does.” Somehow, try as we might, one cannot exist without the other.