Holly Humberstone's story begins long before the big halls and festival fields, in a small village outside Grantham. In a house where music permeated the walls, she grew up with the alt-folk of Damien Rice and the poetry her father read to her. She wrote her own melodies as a counterpoint to those poems, discovered the guitar, and recorded her first rough demos on her father's old computer. When she sent a few of those demos to BBC Music as a teenager, her song 'Hit and Run' was played on the radio within a week. What followed was a breakthrough EP that firmly placed her in the modern pop landscape, with a sound that was raw, intimate, and unfiltered honest. The new album 'Cruel World' is written with a new discipline through daily studio sessions with collaborator Rob Milton and draws deeply from love: romantic, platonic, and feminine. Growing up among strong women, Holly speaks about the way girls are taught to see each other as competition, unlearning that instinct, and reclaiming solidarity as a means of survival.