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Holly Humberstone: People can't connect to a pop star who's 'too polished'

By · Published by Everything Blog

In short

The former Brits Rising Star winner spent 2025 clearing out 23 years of personal belongings from her childhood residence before relocating to south-east London. This sudden displacement left her feeling uprooted, prompting her to use the songwriting process on *Cruel World* as both a shield and an emotional outlet. The album tackles raw themes ranging from unstable relationships to the damaging beauty standards female musicians confront.

Key points

  • Songwriting served as an essential emotional coping mechanism for Humberstone during peri…: Songwriting served as an essential emotional coping mechanism for Humberstone during periods of intense personal instability.
  • The album's final track directly addresses the harmful aesthetic standards and toxic peer…: The album's final track directly addresses the harmful aesthetic standards and toxic peer comparisons imposed on women in music.
  • Humberstone has actively worked to unlearn destructive competitive mindsets formed during…: Humberstone has actively worked to unlearn destructive competitive mindsets formed during her schooling and early record label experiences.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

- Published

You might know her as a pop star, endorsed by everyone from Taylor Swift to Sam Fender, but Holly Humberstone has a secret double life.

In her spare time, the singer-songwriter is literally a cat burglar.

"We've stolen one of our neighbours' cats by accident," she laughs, in a Zoom call from her fixer-upper in New Cross, south-east London.

"He's a tiny little black cat who's come into our garden and simply chosen us."

Under the slightest scrutiny, however, her story crumbles like a biscuit in a hot cup of tea.

"OK, we've been coercing him into the house with treats," she admits. "He's just so cute.

"But we're not trying to keep him. We literally push him out every night."

Humberstone's excuse for this feline felony is that, last year, her parents sold her childhood home in Lincolnshire, external and moved to Wales – taking her pets with them.

One, a cat called Tsuki, had even been immortalised in the song Lucy as a confidante who listens to her problems but "never judges".

"Oh, she knows some…

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