LOS ANGELES, CA- In today’s pop landscape, there is no shortage of young women making exceptionally good music. Gracie Abrams, Olivia Dean, Olivia Rodrigo, Madison Beer and Audrey Hobert are among a generation of artists who have made emotional candor and sharply observed songwriting central to contemporary pop. Holly Humberstone certainly belongs somewhere in that conversation. She has, after all, shared stages with both Rodrigo and Taylor Swift, and will tour with Abrams later this year.
But lately, I have found myself returning to Humberstone more than almost anyone else.
As much as I loved Rodrigo’s most recent album, Humberstone’s Cruel World may be the pop record I have listened to most this year. There is something about Humberstone’s vocal delivery and plainspoken lyricism that connects with me. Her songs don’t necessarily feel like they are trying to impress you with their cleverness. They often feel more like thoughts that escaped someone’s head before they had the opportunity to be cleaned up or made less vulnerable.
Cruel World, Humberstone’s second full-length album, released this past April, takes that quality and stretches it across a considerably broader musical canvas. The record remains pop at its core, but Humberstone and longtime collaborator Rob Milton move comfortably between live instrumentation, d&b beats, electronic textures and lush, sometimes cinematic arrangements. It is an album about love and heartache, but also memory, growing older and trying to understand who you are when the things that once defined you begin to change.
Some of that introspection came from Humberstone finally having the opportunity to stand still.
After reading several articles about it, I learned that after spending years in the cycle of touring, recording and constantly looking toward whatever came next, Humberstone stepped away from the road in 2025 and returned to something resembling ordinary life. She spent time with friends and her sisters and helped her parents move out of the family home where she had grown up. Humberstone explained that making Cruel World gave her an opportunity to separate Holly Humberstone the artist from Holly Humberstone the person and consider who she was outside of a career that had become all-consuming. Going through the possessions in her childhood home also reconnected her with an earlier version of herself she felt she had lost somewhere along the way.
You can hear that searching throughout Cruel World. There is new love and heartbreak, nostalgia and uncertainty, and often seemingly contradictory emotions occupying the same space.
On June 29 at Hollywood’s Fonda Theatre, those intensely personal ideas became something else entirely.
Opening the evening was Leyla Ebrahimi, a Persian-American singer-songwriter whose relatively short recording history belies an already well-defined musical identity. Raised in Virginia before eventually making her way to Brooklyn, Ebrahimi only began releasing music in 2024, but has quickly built momentum around songs that treat emotional vulnerability less as something delicate than something capable of exploding without warning. That progression culminated this June with her debut EP, Planet You Forgot Me, a six-song introduction to an artist who seems particularly interested in all of the messy spaces between longing, abandonment, desire and self-preservation.
Musically, Ebrahimi proved to be a particularly fitting choice to open for Humberstone. Her songs can begin with the intimacy of an acoustic confession before swelling into dream-pop, electronic textures and distorted alt-rock, often allowing sweetness and volatility to occupy the same space. “I’m Sorry Maria,” for example, moves from mellow guitars and almost nostalgic pop into increasingly urgent synths and distortion, a dynamic that captures much of what makes Ebrahimi intriguing at this early stage of her career. There is something restless about her music, as though the quietest thought might suddenly become the loudest thing in the room. For an audience waiting for Humberstone, whose own songwriting thrives on turning private anxieties into communal catharsis, Ebrahimi made considerable sense as the night’s opening voice.
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This was the final American show of Humberstone’s Cruel World tour, and there was no sense that she or her band were conserving anything for another night. From the opening “So It Starts…” into “Make It All Better” and “To Love Somebody,” the performance had the vigor of a band that knew exactly where the finish line was and intended to sprint through it. The Fonda itself confirmed the June 29 show as Humberstone’s Los Angeles date, with Leyla Ebrahimi supporting.
There was also very little nonsense to the performance. This was storytelling through music.
The energy was there from the beginning, but the evening seemed to kick into another gear whenever the emotional weight of Humberstone’s lyrics met the recognition of the audience. Older songs such as “The Walls Are Way Too Thin” and “Overkill” sat comfortably alongside the new material. And if newer fans had arrived because of Cruel World, Humberstone’s longtime followers were present in force.
“Paint My Bedroom Black” made that abundantly clear.
Hands waved overhead to the beat as voices throughout the Fonda defiantly sang along. Then came “Down Swinging,” where the emotional intensity of the performance seemed to rise another level. These aren’t songs that require elaborate choreography or spectacle to command a room. Humberstone’s greatest tool is the connection people have already formed with the words before she ever walks onstage.
At one point, Humberstone acknowledged that this was the end of the run. The shows, she told the audience, had kept getting better and better, which only made reaching the final night bittersweet.
That reality seemed to hit particularly hard when she introduced “Deep End.”
Humberstone recalled sitting with her parents listening to the song when it first came out. Now, years removed from that moment, she was standing onstage in Hollywood preparing to perform it for a packed room.
There are career milestones that can be measured in streams, ticket sales and increasingly large stages. Then there are moments like that. An artist remembers listening to one of her earliest songs with her family and suddenly realizes that hundreds of strangers thousands of miles from home know it, too.
That relationship between Humberstone and her audience became even more apparent during “Red Chevy.”
As the crowd shouted along to its chorus, a situation developed on the floor that required security’s attention. Humberstone stopped the performance to make sure the fan was okay. Once things had settled, there was really only one appropriate solution.
They ran it back from the top.
The Fonda erupted.
By the time the main set approached its conclusion with “Drunk Dialling” and “Dive,” I had moved upstairs to photograph the end of the show. It was from that bird’s-eye perspective that something about Humberstone’s audience became much easier to see.
Everybody was moving.
Looking down from the balcony, I could see people throughout the seated sections mouthing the words and swaying almost en masse. These aren’t necessarily dance songs, at least not in the conventional sense. Yet people were dancing anyway. They knew the words. They knew when the changes were coming. They seemed less like spectators watching Humberstone perform than participants inhabiting the songs alongside her.
Perhaps that’s what I had been hearing all year when I kept returning to Cruel World.
Humberstone’s music creates an unusual kind of communal intimacy. She writes about emotions that feel intensely private, but she writes about them plainly enough that listeners can recognize themselves inside them. The specificity doesn’t shut anyone out. Somehow, it invites them in.
That quality feels especially meaningful given where Cruel World came from. Humberstone made the album after stepping away long enough to question who she was when she wasn’t performing. “Beauty Pageant,” in particular, confronts the pressures of presentation and the competitiveness Humberstone had internalized as a young woman entering the music industry. She has since spoken about recognizing that other female artists did not have to be viewed as competition and that success did not need to be treated as a finite resource.
Maybe that’s also why trying to determine where Humberstone ranks among this extraordinary generation of young female songwriters ultimately misses the point.
There is room for Gracie Abrams. There is room for Olivia Rodrigo. There is room for Audrey Hobert. There is room for all of them.
And there is unquestionably room for Holly Humberstone.
After the main set, she returned for an encore beginning with “Lucy.” When it ended, Humberstone offered the audience one last thought: “Love your neighbors, thank you for being here.”
Then came “Scarlett.”
From upstairs, I could hear the audience shouting the song’s rapid-fire passage back toward the stage. It was one final demonstration of what had been happening all night. Humberstone would offer up something personal, and the room would return it to her with hundreds of voices.
“I don’t want to go back home,” she admitted near the end of the evening.
“I’ve had the best last night of tour.”
For an artist who had to step away from touring to rediscover something about herself, there was something fitting about ending the American leg this way.
Holly Humberstone may write songs born in bedrooms, family homes, relationships, anxieties and thoughts she once kept largely to herself. But at the Fonda Theatre, none of them belonged solely to her anymore.
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LIVE CLIPS
I Keep Coming Back to Holly Humberstone. At the Fonda, I Understood Why
