“My sorry ass revolves around you,” laments Holly Humberstone on “Into Your Room”, the latest single from her tear-stained debut album, Paint My Bedroom Black. Her vocals light – with a sultry snag of vintage Britney’s lip-bitten moan – over wonky synths, the 23-year-old from rural Lincolnshire channels a scene from 1989 high-school movie Say Anything, as she asks a lover to imagine her standing outside his house with “a freshly ripped heart from my ribcage, and a boombox/ How pathetic, babe.” Oh yes, the youthful heartbreak force is strong in this one! No wonder her label sent her out on tour supporting Olivia Rodrigo.
The buzz around Humberstone – a classically trained violinist turned singer-songwriter – built slowly. Pre-pandemic, she sent some demos off to the BBC and won herself a slot on the BBC Introducing stage at Glastonbury 2019, where she was spotted by a manager. Although there was no music scene in her part of northern England, the Covid pandemic had levelled the playing field by ensuring there was no music scene anywhere.
Her first EP, Falling Asleep at the Wheel, was released in the summer of 2020. A year later, she charmed America by performing lines such as, “we go together like bad British weather,” (from her second EP The Wall Are Way Too Thin), on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Although her melodies were less well crafted than her lyrics, she was named 2022’s Brit Rising Star (previously awarded to Adele, Florence and the Machine and Sam Fender) and now her mid-tempo songs of romantic yearning, drunken confusion and regret have been streamed over 220 million times. Although my high school-age kids hadn’t heard of her until this week.
Paint My Bedroom Black sees Humberstone continuing to channel her sloshing moods into sweet alt-pop grooves. There’s an echo of Ellie Goulding’s “Love Me Like You Do” on the knowing wallowing of the post-break-up title track. “I’m going to turn my music up/ I’m going to tear my posters up” she breathes over a low-slung rhythm guitar and synth pulse. That same guitar drives “Cocoon”, with its catchy shrug of a chorus: “I’m just going through something.”
You can hear a little Phoebe Bridgers-inspired introspection on the grungier slog of “Kissing in Swimming Pools”, while “Antichrist” benefits from splashes of liquid piano – although Humberstone isn’t convincing when presenting herself as the “toxic” component of a relationship. Lines such as, “Let me make this clear/ I’m the only problem here,” should probably be delivered with crisp conviction, not a dreamy croon. She gets closer to finding her inner villain on the pacier “Lauren”, singing: “In my defence, you should never trust a girl who sleeps on a mattress on the floor/ and has a thousand unread messages.”
The stomping riff of “Superbloodmoon” and the short vocodered hymn of “Baby Blues” stand out, but many of these tired and emotional songs blur together. Humberstone’s emotions smudge into the similar-sounding synth beds like so much cried-off mascara. Although she’s got the makings of a great songwriter, she needs to push the sounds into sharper corners to give her narratives more distinctive definition. Because this album delivers many shades of grey but never the promised punch of black.
