Paint My Bedroom Black

Critically acclaimed and award winning singer songwriter Holly Humberstone today announces her highly anticipated debut album Paint My Bedroom Black, to be released on 13 October 2023 on Polydor / Darkroom / Geffen. Always inspired by her environment and how that affects her sense of self and identity, from her parent’s Haunted House to flat-shares in London with The Walls Are Way To Thin, Paint My Bedroom Black represents Holly’s coming of age, growing from unknown singer at her parent’s piano to the most exciting alternative pop stars of her generation. 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, today releasing “Antichrist” and “Room Service”, 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.

“Antichrist is about a break up I went through a couple of years ago. I genuinely cared about this person and wanted so badly to make it work, but I knew something wasn’t right and my heart wasn’t in it. I knew that I was inevitably going to have to hurt the person who I wanted so much to love. At the time I wrote the song, I remember feeling like I was constantly letting those around me down. Like I was falling short of being there for anyone I cared about. I basically felt like the worst person in the world; like the Antichrist. I really felt that I was toxic to be around, and the guilt and self-loathing that came with that manifested itself in this song.”

“I wrote Room Service a little while ago when I’d just started touring full time. I was finding myself constantly stressed out and although I was having fun, I was really missing home and my friends. I felt like I was watching them live out their lives from a phone screen, like I was being left behind. There was this swelling feeling that I was growing apart from that world that I was missing so badly, and I just didn’t want to be forgotten. All I wanted to do was to get a hotel room with my best friend, lock the world out and do stupid stuff like order room service. To me, this song is a simple love song to the people I care about the most, and the seemingly basic experiences you share together that can so often be taken for granted. The busier I get, the more I treasure the precious time I get with my friends and family; the more I value them in my life.” – says Holly Humberstone

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.

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.