Holly Humberstone offers a glistening, gut-punching confession on “To Love Somebody,” a buoyant, achingly beautiful heartbreak anthem that insists love is worth the pain.
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“To Love Somebody” – Holly Humberstone
To love somebody / To hurt somebody / To lose somebody / Is to know you’re only human honey…
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I cried happy tears the first time I listened to “To Love Somebody” – not because it’s so devastating, but because it feels true.
The song reached straight into my own love story, into that overwhelming, grounding joy of being in love and choosing it fully. My partner, my wife, is my best friend – and for me, I’ve always believed it’s better to love and lose than never love at all (though I hope it never comes to that). Holly Humberstone captures that feeling with rare clarity here – the decision to cherish every second you’re given, knowing love may not last forever, and choosing it anyway.
Humberstone has long had a gift for translating interior life into something shared, and “To Love Somebody” feels like a natural evolution of that instinct. Released January 23rd as the lead single from her forthcoming sophomore album Cruel World (due April 10), the track introduces a new chapter that’s warmer, more grounded, and self-assured. Where her earlier work often wrestled with turbulence and displacement, this song is anchored in reflection – shaped by acceptance rather than fear. Sonically, it shimmers with an upbeat temper and a warm, glistening melodic glow, proof that pain and joy don’t cancel each other out; they coexist.
True to form, Humberstone doesn’t treat love like a simple storyline. She’s spent the past half-decade turning the quiet turbulence of young adulthood into something cinematic, visceral, and unflinchingly intimate – spilling her heart out in bruised poetry that reads like it was torn from the pages of a coming-of-age diary. Ever since Falling Asleep at the Wheel first introduced her in 2020, she’s been a longtime Atwood Magazine favorite – an artist whose music aches from the inside out, not for drama’s sake, but for connection.
This ethos came fully into focus on her 2023 debut album Paint My Bedroom Black, a bold, bruised, and breathtaking coming-of-age statement that found Humberstone emerging from her own shadows with painstaking intimacy, vulnerability, and unfiltered resolve. Written amid constant motion – hotel rooms, tour buses, late-night reckonings far from home – the record wrestled openly with turbulence, longing, and the search for belonging, pairing loud catharsis with hushed confession in equal measure. Songs like “Paint My Bedroom Black,” “Into Your Room,” and “Cocoon” captured love as both sanctuary and undoing, while the album as a whole traced a young artist learning how to live inside her feelings rather than run from them. It was a record that didn’t flinch, earning its power not through spectacle, but through empathy – a celebration of raw humanity, lived fully and freely. Whether she’s reckoning with home, heartbreak, self-worth, or the messy in-betweens, Humberstone has always written like feeling is the point – that being human means being moved, cracked open, and brave enough to say it out loud.
That’s what makes “To Love Somebody” feel so instantly identifiable and true to her core: Even in its brightest moments, it holds the full weight of the thing it’s singing about – the beauty and the bruise in the same breath, the way love can be grounding and destabilizing all at once.
There’s a familiar Humberstone alchemy here: Warm, glistening melody meeting vulnerable, clear-eyed honesty, catharsis hiding in plain sight, a chorus that lands like a truth you already knew but needed to hear again. It’s the sound of an artist who’s never been afraid of the deepest cuts – only now, she’s letting the light in, too.
The song’s verses move through heartbreak with a wry, almost cinematic self-awareness:
So you crashed into the wall
You’re cleaning up the broken glass
Thinking what the hell was that
In the movie of your life
You’re the first to die
And the critics called it trash
Too bad
They tell you that you feel too much
Euphoria right down to the crush
It all breaks down, it always does
It all works out, it always does
And the shit they say, in the songs you love
The greatest hits, the deepest cuts
It all breaks down, it always does
It all works out, it always does
At its core, “To Love Somebody” is about cherishing the love you have, and honoring the love you had, even if it doesn’t last. The song moves with a gentle momentum, pairing buoyant melodies with lyrics that don’t flinch from the cost of feeling deeply. “To love somebody / To hurt somebody / To lose somebody / Is to know you’re only human honey,” Humberstone sings, reframing heartbreak not as failure, but as evidence of having lived and loved fully, truly, transparently, and unapologetically. It’s a song that understands how love can be grounding and destabilizing at the same time – how it can bruise you and still be worth everything.
To love somebody
To hurt somebody
To lose somebody
Is to know you’re only human honey
To love somebody
To hurt somebody
To lose somebody
Well at least you got to love somebody
This balance – between love’s beauty and its bruises – is something Humberstone understands instinctively, and it’s baked into the heart of her song. “I wrote ‘To Love Somebody’ after watching someone close to me go through a brutal heartbreak,” she tells Atwood Magazine. “It’s better to have loved and lost, even when it sucks, because feeling everything is part of the human experience. Loving hard is a painful thing and there are two sides to love, and they exist in the same space to me. They are all real, brutal, and vulnerable experiences. This blue and green ball just keeps spinning and you learn to ride things out.”
It’s better to have loved and lost, even when it sucks, because feeling everything is part of the human experience.
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What gives “To Love Somebody” its staying power isn’t just what Humberstone says about love, but how closely she studies what it feels like to move through it. The verses are filled with small, unglamorous moments of reckoning – crashing into walls, cleaning up broken glass, brushing your teeth, putting on powder, trying to look presentable enough to rejoin the world. Heartbreak here isn’t mythologized; it’s experienced and expressed in real time, narrated with a wry self-awareness that acknowledges both the absurdity and the ache. When she frames pain as “the movie of your life” where you’re “the first to die” and “the critics called it trash,” Humberstone turns vulnerability into perspective – not to diminish it, but to survive it. There’s humor in the humiliation, resilience in the self-mockery, and an understanding that sometimes the only way through is to name the mess as honestly as possible.
You took a right hook to the jaw
So you go and brush your teeth
A little powder on your cheeks
And you feel a little better
And this blue and green ball
Keeps spinning to the beat
You gotta try and move your feet
Gotta be boxing clever
They tell you that you feel too much
you bet it all on a summer crush
It all breaks down, it always does
It all works out, it always does
The humanity deepens as the song widens its lens, tracing how love and loss coexist with the ordinary forward motion of life. The world keeps spinning; the beat doesn’t stop; you still have to move your feet. Humberstone captures that push-and-pull – between feeling too much and carrying on anyway – with striking tenderness. Whether she’s wearing someone’s T-shirt while hating their guts, or betting everything on a summer crush, her lines resist neat conclusions, honoring the contradictions that define real relationships. Love isn’t presented as clean or instructive; it’s chaotic, devotional, embarrassing, sustaining. By the time she circles back to the refrain – that it all breaks down, and it all works out – it doesn’t read as blind optimism, but as hard-earned truth. Not because everything is fine, but because feeling deeply, even when it hurts, is proof of being alive. That’s the grace of “To Love Somebody”: It doesn’t promise safety or security, only meaning – and in Humberstone’s hands, that’s more than enough.
And you wear his t shirt you hate his guts
You read the hand book, you take the drugs
You said from here on out it’s us
It always was, it always was
Seen this way, the song becomes less about heartbreak itself and more about loving (and losing) wholeheartedly and with no regrets – learning how to stand back up, re-enter the world, and keep choosing love anyway.
That perspective feels inseparable from the season Humberstone currently finds herself in. Cruel World, out April 10 via Interscope Records, arrives not as a return to chaos, but as a reclamation of steadiness. Where Paint My Bedroom Black wrestled openly with turbulence and displacement, this new chapter is anchored in belonging – shaped by repair, discipline, and a renewed sense of agency. After years of living out of suitcases and hotel rooms, Humberstone moved back into a house of her own making, rebuilding both her physical space and her emotional center. “Music isn’t the stressful part of my life anymore,” she says. “It became the anchor, the constant, while everything else was shifting.”
You can hear that shift all over Cruel World, a record rooted less in chaos than in ownership. “This feels like my work more than before,” Humberstone says. “I’m in control of everything. No is a complete sentence. I just wanted to make something I’ll be proud of looking back at, something that is mine.” There’s a calm confidence in that statement – an arrival that stretches from the raw, searching vulnerability of Falling Asleep at the Wheel through the bruised catharsis of Paint My Bedroom Black and the stripped-back intimacy of her Work in Progress demos, each chapter building toward this moment of creative authorship. “My eleven-year-old self would be buzzing,” she reflects. “I think she’d say: You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.”
It’s telling that “To Love Somebody” follows last year’s “Die Happy,” another gothic meditation on devotion’s thrill and danger. Together, they sketch the emotional architecture of Cruel World – an album that holds chaos and acceptance side by side, that understands love as both grounding and destabilizing. “The record explores love as beautiful and inherently painful,” Humberstone says. Written with daily discipline alongside longtime collaborator Rob Milton, and shaped by the women who have defined her life, the album leans into complexity rather than fleeing from it. Humberstone isn’t romanticizing pain; she’s acknowledging its inevitability and choosing connection anyway.
If Cruel World is about claiming ownership, then “To Love Somebody” is about surrendering to what that ownership allows – the freedom to feel deeply without apology, to stay open even when the outcome isn’t guaranteed.
Love isn’t a game of winning or losing; it’s connection, memory, emotion, and lived experience. “To Love Somebody” doesn’t argue with pain or try to outpace it – it accepts it as part of the deal. In doing so, Humberstone offers something cathartic and comforting: Permission to love without guarantees, to cherish connection without conditions, and to believe that even when love ends, it still counts. Sometimes the bravest thing we do is love, knowing it might hurt. “To Love Somebody” understands that, and it meets us right there – open-hearted, unguarded, and beautifully human.
For me, this song feels like a quiet vow. To keep choosing love while it’s here, to stay present in the joy of it, and to hold every shared moment with care. If loving fully means risking loss, I’ll still take it every time. “To Love Somebody” reminds me that nothing meaningful comes without vulnerability, and that the love we give and receive, however long it lasts, is never wasted.
To love somebody
To hurt somebody
To lose somebody
Is to know you’re only human honey
To love somebody
To hurt somebody
To lose somebody
Well at least you got to love somebody
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:: read more about Holly Humberstone here ::
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:: connect with Holly Humberstone here ::
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