Holly Humberstone's Honest Truth

After opening for Olivia Rodrigo on tour, the singer-songwriter is ready to make her big debut - all while staying grounded in the strength of sisterhood

- Waiss Aramesh

HOLLY HUMBERSTONE is pretty sure her childhood home is haunted.

Sitting in an average-sized hotel room in New York’s Gramercy neighbourhood, the 23-year-old songwriter gets excited discussing the home she grew up in, which is 3,000 miles away in Grantham in the UK. “There’s this huge basement and just spiders and frogs down there,” Humberstone says. “There’s this whole grim room in the cellar that has meat hooks and then gutters so all the blood can run.”

Humberstone and her three sisters let their imaginations run wild in the old home while their parents stayed busy as NHS doctors. (She thinks the house might have originally been built as servants’ quarters for a larger residence.) “It was like our own little universe,” Humberstone says. “We’d fuck about and do creative stuff, just mess the house up, do art, do music, play games, create stuff, play outside, scribble on the walls.”

These days, Humberstone is busy making a name for herself as one of the most candid new songwriters in pop music. Since summer 2020, she’s released two EPs, picked up a Rising Star Award at the 2022 BRITs — a category previously won by artists like Adele, Sam Smith and Florence + the Machine — and toured North America as an opening act on Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour tour, along with another stint opening for Girl in Red. “There’s nothing more inspiring than watching two fucking rock-star young girls every single night for three months,” she says.

On her debut album,