Grantham, UK · alt-pop

Holly Humberstone

7 festivals played ↓

Bruised, cinematic alt-pop — Grantham's bedroom-to-BRIT-Award story, small-town detail sung in a fog of reverb, intimacy that scales to festival fields.

Holly Humberstone was born in Nottingham in 1999 and grew up in Grantham, Lincolnshire, one of four sisters to two doctors. She studied at Kesteven and Grantham Girls' Grammar School before training at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, having played violin in the Lincolnshire Youth Symphony Orchestra as a teenager.

She was first noticed after performing on BBC Radio Lincolnshire's Music Introducing show while still at school, which led to a manager taking interest. Her early recordings, made at home, gave her a stock of confessional songs about small-town life that she began releasing as singles from January 2020, starting with "Deep End."

Her debut EP, Falling Asleep at the Wheel, followed in August 2020 and included a cover of Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees." In 2021 she signed with Polydor and Darkroom Records and released a second EP, The Walls Are Way Too Thin, performing songs from it on American television before winning the Brit Award for Rising Star that December.

Humberstone opened for Girl in Red and Olivia Rodrigo on North American tours in 2022, the same year she released a singles compilation, Can You Afford to Lose Me?. Her full-length debut, Paint My Bedroom Black, arrived in 2023, with a second album, Cruel World, following later.

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alt-pop