No glitter gel pens here, this is a scribbled black pen kind of artist
Review of Holly Humberstone’s Paint My Bedroom Black
Holly Humberstone — Paint My Bedroom Black
Released October 12, 2023
Before Holly Humberstone opened for Taylor Swift in August for one of Swift’s 5 nights in London on the Eras Tour, she has been releasing music since 2020 with much acclaim given to her first two EPs, titled Falling Asleep At The Wheel and The Walls Are Way Too Thin. Since then, she has also opened for artists Olivia Rodrigo on her SOUR tour and Girl in Red, and she received a Rising Star award at the 2021 BRITs Awards, presented to her by Sam Fender. She’s also collaborated with Matty Healy of the 1975 on a 2022 single called “Sleep Tight.” It seems like she’s better known in her native UK, but for now, American audiences, particularly fans of Swift, have yet to catch on.
On what is technically her debut album, Humberstone’s thirteen track Paint My Bedroom Black, will hopefully serve as her big introduction to a global audience. While I did call this Humberstone’s technical debut, I find this to be a small discrepancy. Spotify has 2022’s Can You Afford To Lose Me? as her first official album, but it appears to be more of an official releasing of her previous two EPs together, making Paint My Bedroom Black her debut album, as Wikipedia explains it to be. I take issue with this because whether an album is a debut or a sophomore effort, while seemingly small potatoes, actually changes the expectations I have and affects the way I listen. If it’s a debut, I’m suspending all preconceived notions, remaining open to how Humberstone is introducing herself musically for the first time. There might be a few singles ahead of a debut album, but largely the first album is the first major introduction we get to an artist’s style and writing. But in this case, for this being technically a debut, we’ve already been introduced to Humberstone over the course of two EPs with enough music to build out a whole other album. So should I be disregarding the previous EPs/album, as I’m inclined to do, and let this album stand alone as a debut, or should I be judging this album against her previously released work and be looking for signs of growth, maturation, and development of style, writing, and overall craft?
My instinct is to disregard the previously released work and focus on this album as a standalone. I’m personally unfamiliar with the EPs, aside from “Scarlett” which I first heard in 2021, so even if the UK public were going into this album with a preconceived notion about Humberstone, I’m going into it completely open and without expectation.
My favorites on this album are “Into Your Room,” “Ghost Me,” “Cocoon,” “Lauren,” “Baby Blues,” and “Girl.”
Being part of that generation of female singer-songwriters that have been born musically out of Taylor Swift’s continued impact on the music industry, of course Humberstone is going to bear comparisons to Swift, but I also recognize in her songwriting a style similar to another under-recognized artist that I adore, Angie McMahon, particularly on “Cocoon.” McMahon and Humberstone, on this song, share a powerfully vulnerable, but ultimately truthful writing style. McMahon often writes lyrics like “Friend, I am a slow, slow mover/Friend, I am a slow, slow girl/Trying to be kind, kind, kinder/Crawling in another world” that I can imagine feels exposing to write and release out into the world, but that connects with listeners and especially with me because of its honesty. We often feel like there are things that are too vulnerable, too personal, too revealing to share and there are brave songwriters like McMahon and Humberstone that go first in sharing their vulnerabilities and struggles that makes it feel safe for the rest of us to share too. When Humberstone sings “I’m just going through something” on this song, it’s such a simple phrase, but it can feel freeing to even say the words, a kind of permission granted to ourselves to feel whatever it is we’re feeling without judgement.
I thought “Kissing in Swimming Pools” was so sweet, she just wants to love so badly.
“Superbloodmoon” featuring D4VID is the sole feature on the album, and their voices sounded really well together. Again a song that has such a simple line that hits the hardest with “Strip down to our vitals.” Not only does the vocal performance on that line scratch my brain a bit and I look forward to it every time it comes back in the chorus, but again it packs a punch visually while communicating succinctly.
Like on “Scarlett,” “Lauren” shows how Humberstone values her friendships and places the same priority on her friends as she does romantic relationships. This song has another killer line in “I used to drive you home/But now I drive you crazy.”
As much as I love “Ghost Me,” it might actually be my number one favorite on the album if not for the spoken part at the end about Spongebob. Some reviews pointed it out for its playfulness and levity, and how it references back to a line in the song about how fast childhood has gone, but personally I felt it was out of place, irrelevant, and felt it took away from the whole song.
Of all the Taylor Swift acolytes, amongst the more famous include Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, and Gracie Abrams, also include Maisie Peters and Holly Humberstone. In my personal opinion, the British Swift disciples are more of a testament to Swift’s legacy. While Rodrigo, Carpenter, and Abrams took Swift’s influence and used it to create their own sounds, their own styles, their own legacies, the British Swiftites Peters and Humberstone are more loyal to her framework. Like Peters, Humberstone is not quite a major pop girlie, but I do believe she is well on her way. She’s already well-respected a songwriter amongst her peers in the UK and similar to the way I feel about Maisie Peters, I really think fans of the soft pop girl genre are missing out on this album.
Whenever other publications refer to another artist as comparing to Taylor Swift, I still get the impression that they are insinuating that a comparison to Swift, a verifiable world-class pop star whose at the height of her powers this year, is an insult. I It’s okay to say Taylor Swift’s name, she’s not Beetlejuice. And it’s okay to compare artists to her. With an entire generation of pop singer-songwriters that are going to follow, it will be impossible not to mention her or her impact on pop music and on this style of songwriting. That said, unlike Swift who has described her own writing as “glitter gel pen”I would characterize Humberstone’s writing as more akin to black pen scribbled furiously, like Phoebe Bridgers. Not that Swift doesn’t have a propensity for the sad, but Bridgers is an artist that is sensitive, but more melancholy. A reviewer described Bridgers’ music as “tender and compassionate, but rarely ever is it tranquil or peaceful…effective for processing unshakeable, pensive sadness,”and I would put Humberstone more in that characterization.
The other thing that sets Humberstone apart from Swift is the existential nature of her lyrics. Not to fall into that trope of saying Swift only writes about relationships and misbehaving ex-boyfriends, she does tell other stories in her songs, like when her mother was ill, remembering her grandmother’s singing, her grandfather’s experience in the war, and her close personal friendships, but she does by and large write about her romantic life. I just want to make it clear as well that there’s nothing wrong with doing that, love and relationships is a very common theme throughout all of human creativity and we shouldn’t be singling out Swift like she’s a lone perpetrator of this when countless artists throughout history have been celebrated for doing the very same thing she stands accused of doing. But we can’t pretend like her personal experiences in dating and love, as astutely and cleverly as they are written, aren’t the bedrock of her lyrical output. Humberstone’s lyrics also deal with relationships both romantic and friendly, but she does so with an existential anxiety that I can recognize as I also have an existential anxiety about most things, so I can very easily understand and see myself in Humberstone’s place, thinking the same thoughts that she does, arriving at the same conclusions.
But, to Humberstone’s credit, she has clearly learned from Swift on how to expertly combine strong pop melodies and production with otherwise deeply personal and confessional lyrics.
Talking about her own writing, Humberstone said “I feel like a chaotic person — in my head, I have trouble processing changes, and a lot of the time I feel weighed down or full of anxiety.” And while I can recognize from my own experiences of worrying existentially that crazy feeling that Humberstone describes, I wish I could tell her what my therapist often tells me, and that is that all of this existential worry is developmentally normal. Even though that doesn’t totally make sense to me, because if my worries are normal, why isn’t everyone else as freaked out and feeling crazy like I am?
Humberstone, like Swift, like Bridgers, like McMahon, are artists who make writing about their personal experiences universal to a wider audience. Whether writing about their romantic relationships, their friendships, existential questions about the world, or about deep wounds that they have, they all resonate with audiences because they write with, what I’m calling, a philosophy of honesty. When I think about having a philosophy of honesty, I think about how we’re all expected to say “I’m good, how are you?” whenever someone asks how we’re doing. It’s taboo, or it’s somehow the wrong answer to really say how you are actually doing. All throughout society we have these little pleasantries to make our interactions more streamline, not too painful, quick, and easy. But by doing that, we’re then forcing down any real feelings and missing out on connection. As someone who fears oversharing, I’m trying to offer more of what I really think and feel to the people around me. I’m trying to be more honest. And what do you know, I feel better when I do that. Even in my writing, I find that when I’m getting stuck, it’s because I’m not being honest. And once I’m able to figure out how to really say the thing I’m wanting to say, then the words start flowing. James Baldwin said “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” And Ethan Hawke said “art’s not a luxury, it’s actually sustenance. We need it.” That’s what good art does, it puts words to feelings we couldn’t otherwise describe on our own, it makes us feel seen and shows us that we’re not the only ones to have ever felt like this before. And, with hope, it inspires us to create art that gives words to someone else’s speechlessness.
Say what you will about this era of “soft pop” or “sad girl pop.” Like with anything that gets big and becomes popular, you’re going to get a reaction against it. But if anything is going to be apart of Taylor Swift’s legacy, I hope it’s this — she made pop music personal. And Humberstone is part of that legacy. May she continue to write songs that gives us permission to open up a bit more freely, and may she finally find a dedicated US fanbase like she so deserves.
