05 October 2023 (Toronto, ON) – A week away from the release of her highly anticipated debut album, Paint My Bedroom Black on 13 October, today Holly Humberstone reveals the chilling new song “Kissing In Swimming Pools”. Lifted from her debut album, “Kissing In Swimming Pools” highlights Holly’s sophisticated lyricism as she empties her heart on the cinematic love song. “So, can we kiss in your swimming pool / In this bathing suit / I would die for you,” says Holly, as she juxtaposes universal experiences with deeply personal commentary and reminds us why she is one of the most important female artists of her generation. Holly performed a version of “Kissing in Swimming Pools” with her band and a live string section for Amazon Curved.
Having just played a run of stunning intimate live shows in partnership with independent record stores across the UK, the BRIT and Ivor nominated singer and songwriter announced her biggest UK and European tour to date, headlining 20 venues in Spring 2024, including The Albert Hall in Manchester on 8 March and London’s Eventim Apollo on 13 March 2024. As she gets ready to release her immaculate debut album Paint My Bedroom Black next Friday the 13th, Holly reflects on the process, writing the album with longtime collaborator Rob Milton during pockets of time touring the globe last year. Holly’s time on the road was lonely as well as liberating, with most days watching friends and family through her phone, while living a “Truman Show-like” existence. “I took ages to write it because I wanted to love them all,” says Holly. Last week, the 23-year-old revealed Hottest Record “Into Your Room”, the fourth single to be lifted from Paint My Bedroom Black, already being playlisted at BBC Radio 1 and Tune Of The Week. The song was written in California, when Rob Milton flew over and the two of them hit up Ethan Gruska (producer for Phoebe Bridgers and Fiona Apple). From Ethan’s small studio outside of LA, they experimented with pawn shop-bought instruments and synths, and wrote “Into Your Room” in one day. It captures Holly’s guilt from not being present in her new relationship, a track that is dappled in dream alt-pop, and reflects the album’s expansive sonic moments that sound like hurtling down a West Coast Highway: “You’re the centre of this universe/my sorry ass revolves around you”.
The production of Paint My Bedroom Black unfolds into new sonic architecture – the teenage bedroom door opens into swathes of LA and London night buses, with high-octane pop pressure points, neon electronica, and 80s rock runs. The album writhes in the lyrical and sonic duality of an artist propelled into new experiences and shifting identities, and represents her coming of age, growing from an unknown singer at her parent’s piano to one of the most exciting alternative pop stars. The dark and otherworldly space Holly has built and invited fans into, both sonically and visually, has been lucid and visceral, with the camera always on her shoulder, a lens into her chaotic thoughts and deep feelings. Already nominated for two Ivor Novello’s, winning the BRIT Rising Star in 2022 and coming runner up in BBC Sound Of 2021, Humberstone’s bear-all storytelling is the heart of her craft. The rising star dropped “Antichrist” and “Room Service” in June, the double A-Side singles that reflect her introspection and extraversion, two opposing artistic multitudes that inform Holly’s lyricism and sound. “I feel like two different people half the time. My biggest challenge is always to make something I feel I haven’t done before, that reflects new parts of me.” The new parts of Holly appear on “Antichrist”, an exposing image of her last break-up, a heartbreak ballad of self-loathing, set against propulsive pop: “Am I the Antichrist? How do I sleep at night?”, juxtaposed against delicate “Room Service”, an ode to locking yourself away from the world. The introduction of these two starkly different tracks act as a revolving door into the visceral duality of Holly Humberstone.
Last month, Holly Humberstone released “Superbloodmoon” featuring d4vd, the third song taken from Paint My Bedroom Black. A Super blood moon is when the Earth’s moon is in a total lunar eclipse and the sky becomes red, and Holly loved the idea of how rare it was. She met billion streaming American singer and songwriter d4vd in London at longtime collaborator Rob Milton’s studio, and they both wrote the song in a few hours, imagining two people staring at the rare lunar eclipse from opposite sides of the world. Always inspired by her environment and how that affects her sense of self and identity, from her parent’s Haunted House to flatshares in London with The Walls Are Way To Thin, “Superbloodmoon” reflects the landscape surrounding Holly, travelling the world, taking a flight last year on tour and trying to find an anchoring and missing loved ones.
With a talent for capturing and characterising moments that are both uncomfortably intimate and brutally revealing in her songwriting and creative – most of Holly’s 2022 was spent in hotel rooms, stuck between places, watching life from afar rather than being totally present in it. Lacking real connections and missing loved ones, the stirring official video for “Antichrist”, directed by Jean-Charles Chavarin, tells the story of the self-flagellation that comes with hurting someone you love, as you run away from yourself, trying to escape from room to room, until your reflection turns away from you. Last week, Holly dropped the “Room Service” video, shot in room 627 on a webcam, the same room that Holly invited 80 fans to hear songs for the first time from Paint My Bedroom Black. Inspired by early zoom calls where Holly’s world felt blurry and faraway, the video captures a day in the life of Holly on tour, trying to find normality and home in the mundane, locked away from the world in a hotel room.
Finishing 2022 on a huge high, ending her biggest UK headline tour with 5000 fans singing back favourites “Scarlett” and “Overkill” at O2 Academy Brixton, the physical manifestation of her 242.6M global streams, Holly Humberstone started 2023 with her journal in hand and creative, walled off time, as she locked herself away in Rob Milton’s studio in London, to piece together the pieces of herself she felt like she left on the road, in rooms across the world. Holly has become renowned for painting a picture of a place so viscerally, being rooted in the walls and also people that makes a city liveable, where you can “get drunk with your mates and just forget about work”. From her family home in “Haunted House” to feeling lost and isolated in her London shared flat with The Walls Are Way To Thin, Paint My Bedroom Black is Holly’s fragmented and dark love letter to friends and lovers, a hideaway from the world when her fans need one.
PAINT MY BEDROOM BLACK TRACKLISTING
- Paint My Bedroom Black
- Into Your Room
- Cocoon
- Kissing In Swimming Pools
- Ghost Me
- Superbloodmoon (featuring d4vd)
- Antichrist
- Lauren
- Baby Blues
- Flatlining
- Elvis Impersonators
- Girl
- Room Service
