Holly Humberstone has shared a new single called ‘The Walls Are Way Too Thin’, alongside an accompanying video directed by Raja Virdi. Watch it below.
“I wrote ‘The Walls Are Way Too Thin’ about a time in my life where I felt like i’d lost control of where I was heading and struggling a little with finding my place in the world,” Humberstone explained in a statement. “It was a very strange period, I’d just moved to London away from my family and all of a sudden everything that I knew to be normal had changed completely. I moved on a whim into this little dingy room. I met some cool people but this place was pretty lonely and claustrophobic. I’m such an awkward person and even though I really liked my housemates I still felt worried about small talk in the kitchen or passing each other in the corridors. I had some fun times there, but I felt like I was mostly confined to my room whilst chaos was going on in the flats or streets around us. To avoid confronting how I was feeling I’d sneak out of the flat and go on train journeys to see my mates, get drunk, then come back hungover through the night or morning. I wrote most of Walls and the songs that come next on those trains. It was my place of therapy, in the middle of nowhere.”
Of the video, she added: “I wanted the music video to reflect how I felt stuck in my room with my own internal anxiety rising. The idea of being trapped in an air vent in a burning building came from that feeling of claustrophobia and panic that I felt throughout my time living in the flat. Shooting the video was chaotic, my elbows and knees look quite different now after 8 hours of crawling back and forth. The fire blast in the vent was totally real too!!”
Last month, Humberstone released a new song called ‘Haunted House’. Earlier this year, she performed ‘Falling Asleep At The Wheel’ on The Late Late Show with James Corden, where she confirmed an upcoming collaboration with the 1975’s Matt Healy.
Revisit our Artist Spotlight Q&A with Holly Humberstone, and check out her pick in our feature 21 Artists on the Songs that Got Them Through 2020.