Rooms feature everywhere on Holly Humberstone’s debut album—including in its title, Paint My Bedroom Black. That wasn’t a conscious move, says the British singer-songwriter, but it’s reflective of when the record was made, on tour in 2022. “I’d say I spent 90 per cent of the year on the road, which I loved,” she tells Apple Music. “My favourite times were last year. But it’s also such an emotional roller coaster: travelling, being in different cities. I started to feel like I was living this weird double life and was struggling to connect with the people back home. I lost sense of who I was a little bit.” Paint My Bedroom Black—written in “grounding” sessions between tour dates—captures Humberstone’s yearning for those people back home and her guilt at not being around enough (see the self-castigating “Antichrist”), but also tentative new love (album standout “Kissing in Swimming Pools”), the simple joy of reuniting with someone you’ve missed (“Room Service”, which recalls José González’s “Heartbeats”) and realisingyou see the same sky as the people you’re miles away from (the d4vd-featuring “Superbloodmoon”). And here, Humberstone embraces the brooding alt-pop that earmarked her as one of the UK’s most promising young singer-songwriters, but expands it too, with touches of country and Americana (she credits her love of Kacey Musgraves and Springsteen for this), skittering electro-pop (“Flatlining”), plenty of vocoder and even ’90s breakbeats (“Lauren”). All of which, to Humberstone, feels like “chaos”. “There’s so much going on, every track is a different story and something new that I’m trying to figure out,” she says. But when the album was finished, she realised it also captured two distinct parts of herself. “I didn’t do it on purpose, but to me, the album is split in two. There’s one side that’s my extrovert self, reclaiming my love for everybody back home and reaching out,” she says. “And then the other side, which is just wanting to shut everything out.” Read on as Humberstone lets us in on her debut record—and both of those sides—one track at a time. “Paint My Bedroom Black” “This was such a release to write. I had a couple of days off and my producer Rob [Milton] flew over to join me in New York. We got a little studio and it was the biggest relief after such a long time. To me this feels like a really intimate track—like I’m wanting to shut everything out. I didn’t write it about anybody. It just came from things that I was feeling about myself and about the world that I was finding myself in. It was just reclaiming myself a little bit. But there’s something positive about it, it feels like the start of something.” “Into Your Room” “I didn’t realise until I finished the record, but rooms come up in nearly every song. This time we were in LA and Rob flew over again and we went in with Ethan Gruska [boygenius, Phoebe Bridgers, Ryan Beatty]. A theme of this album is feeling like I was neglecting people at home and not being there for the people I wanted to be there for—and I wanted to turn those things into something that felt positive. It’s a love song about wanting to be close to someone. We were trying to get across an embrace of somebody after not having seen them for such a long time—[I was] proclaiming my love for people back home. The production is really upbeat and sparkly and shiny.” “Cocoon” “I got off tour and was trying to navigate picking things up at home after being away for so long. It’s really hard getting back home and being jet-lagged, and then that rolling into not wanting to get out of bed [or] face the fact that I’ve returned to normal life. Mental health and feeling depressed isn’t an easy thing to write about but it felt really important to do that. An angsty, guitar-heavy song was fun and really healing to write.” “Kissing in Swimming Pools” “We wrote and recorded it in a day and didn’t change much. It’s about the start of a relationship. I’d gotten home and been able to see this person a little bit more, and it was just a really positive thing that was going on in my life alongside the stresses of trying to write an album, being on tour and being away. I just wanted to write a love song for this person, that was all there was to it. Everything felt live and washy and reverbing, because that’s how those feelings are.” “Ghost Me” “One of my strengths and downfalls is that I form really strong attachments to people and then become dependent on them—I cling onto people a lot. When everything else is changing, I find it really comforting to know that the people back home are still there and that they’re kind of a constant. I think that this song especially is me wanting to literally clutch on for dear life to these people. The voice note at the end is my friend Lauren. She had sent it to me earlier that day and I just thought it was hilarious. We put it in, thinking that it was a joke and that we were probably going to take it out at a later date. But it just never ended up coming out.” “Superbloodmoon” (feat. d4vd) “I’d been a fan of d4vd’s for a while and knew he was in London, so reached out. I’d had the title ‘Superbloodmoon’ in my notes and something like ‘The Superbloodmoon, can you see it from where you are?’ He was able to relate to me quite a lot with the touring and being away from home and wanting that one thing that would connect you back to the people you were longing to see. I’m so grateful to d4vd for being so down to be part of it.” “Antichrist” “This is about the end of my first proper relationship where I just couldn’t be enough for them. And just feeling like a bit of a letdown, I guess. Obviously I’m over-exaggerating [in the song]—I’m not actually a terrible person! I feel like you hear a lot of breakup songs and being broken-hearted and somebody hurting you, but I’d never really heard many songs about being on the other side of it and how that can also break your heart a little bit, about who you thought you were. It’s kind of an apology song.” “Lauren” “This was another with Rob and Ethan. We’d been in a new space in London for a good few days and I’d not been able to make any progress with writing. The studio had this old-fashioned drum machine and it was about building something that felt cool from that to try and spark some sort of inspiration. Ethan built this weird drum loop and then I jumped on the Wurlitzer and started playing some kind of darker chords underneath. And that’s where the song came from.” “Baby Blues” “There’s the voice note from Lauren and there’s the song ‘Lauren’ about her obviously. I wrote quite a lot of songs about her. I wrote this about her coming to visit—she’d come to visit me and then she’d left. I wanted to write about seeing her getting off the train and being across the zebra crossing from me and just getting to see somebody that I loved again. It was so simple. I got addicted to the demo—I thought it was perfect, this little snippet. A little breath.” “Flatlining” “The person I wrote ‘Antichrist’ about moved literally down the road from me, with a friend. When you have the same friends, your lives are kind of intwined and at some point you’re going to run into each other. It’s that fear of being ambushed by old feelings that I really just want to bury and not think about. But it ended up being totally fine and, after I wrote this, I felt like we were friends again, which is weird because the chorus is, ‘We just can’t be friends anymore.’ But I think I have a tendency to blow things out of proportion! We introduced the little heart monitor sounds and I think you can hear the anxiety in the percussion—the feeling of not knowing where your head is at or how things are going to play out. It’s an anxiety-inducing song, for sure.” “Elvis Impersonators” “I wanted to write about my sister being away—she lives in Tokyo and she must have such a different life that I have nothing to do with, which is really hard to grasp. I really don’t know the person that she is over there. We’d been to visit her before the pandemic and we had this really hilarious night out where there were all of these Michael Jackson and Elvis impersonators. It was just really bizarre but funny, and I wanted to put it into a song. But this is really about missing a sister.” “Girl” “It’s yearning for a deeper connection. I think when you’re away, you meet so many people and so many things that seem superficial and surface level. I think the yearning in my voice in this song represents what it’s about.” “Room Service” “I’m sure a lot of people are a lot busier than me and have a lot more on their plate than me and have to travel a lot more than I do. But for me, I’m still learning to navigate this side of my life and being away from home more than I’m used to. This song was about wanting to go somewhere really cool and then just shut ourselves in our room, order room service and catch up: This is the only place that I want to be, the only thing that really matters. Which is how I feel about my friends and everybody I wrote this album about. It felt like the closing track because it sums everything up to me in a really nice way. It feels like the closing of the chapter.”