Her big sister has been the creative director on this album, which makes perfect sense the moment she describes their working relationship. “She knows me better than anybody in the world,” “We kind of just have the same tastes.” The two spent months Pinterest boarding, watching films, going on what she affectionately calls “crazy tangents.” There were Tim Burton movies, Czech New Wave films, a bizarre and beautiful thing called Valerie and Her Week of Wonders that she couldn’t follow plot-wise but couldn’t stop watching. “Everything feels a bit fake,” she says of it, delighted. “The colors are really vivid.” She’d gone in a Shrek girlie, she admits. She came out changed.

The whole visual world of the record, filmed over a few days in a southwest London theatre with a female director at the helm, grew out of that same spirit. “Everybody was kind of working with each other because we respected what each other did,” she says. The result is something that feels pulled from a childhood memory of the ballet: a world that’s fabricated but fully real while you’re inside it. Otherworldly. A little crusty. Vivid.

Humberstone released her first song in 2020. “Six years is both a long time and no time at all”, she says. Long enough to understand how the industry works, how she works within it, and what she needs to do to stay sane. “Part of that has been stepping up and taking a bit more agency in what I’m doing,” she says. “Being a bit less passive.”

There’s something different in her now compared to where she was even a year ago. A shift in what she’s focused on. She used to look ahead constantly, anxious about what was coming. Now she’s trying to stay in the room she’s already in. “This is so cool,” she says, and she means it about all of it. The album, the press run, being in Toronto, sitting here. “I might as well enjoy it. It could all be gone tomorrow.”

“I don’t wanna spend my career doing this amazing thing I’ve always dreamt of doing too stressed to enjoy it.”

A lot of that shift, she says, came from watching other women do it. She opened for the Eras Tour in 2024: Paramore and Taylor Swift, a night she still talks about with barely contained disbelief. She’s toured with Girl in Red, with Olivia Rodrigo. “Getting to watch them perform and just be fully themselves,” she says, “made me realize that I need to find whatever it is that I do that’s unique and double down on that. They already did everything else the best. I can only do me.”

That unlearning, of the idea that women are in competition, that there’s only room for one, hasn’t always been easy. She grew up with three sisters, went to an all-girls school, never felt that competitive energy internally. But the industry had its own way of manufacturing it. “It was so weird coming out of secondary school and going straight into this,” she says. “I felt like I was in competition with my peers, even though that’s completely crazy.” She’s tired of the feeling now. More than that, she’s free of it. “There’s room for everybody to win. That’s the cool thing about music.”

The album touches on romantic love, but it doesn’t stop there. It stretches into the platonic and the feminine: the love of friends, of sisters, of the women who hold your life together in the years when everything is shifting. “It would be really strange for me not to address that,” she says. “It’s just as important to me.”

She still lives with two of her sisters. The house they share has become its own kind of universe, safe, grounding, a place to go through your twenties with people who love you. “We all have our separate journeys,” she says, “but it feels like a real safe space.” The record grew out of that space, quietly, the way most important things do.

I ask her what she thinks her younger self would say if she could hear it. She doesn’t hesitate. “She’d be buzzing,” she says. “She’d be so gassed.” Growing up in middle England with nothing going on, performing on stage felt like a pipe dream. Something other people got to do. “Unless you grow up in London or have some kind of natural way in, it feels mythical.” She laughs a little. “Luckily I had the most amazing, nurturing parents. Honestly, kind of delusional support.”

“I wish I could go back and be like, babe, it’s gonna happen. It’s so cool.”

She pauses. “I’ll never take it for granted.”

The conversation winds down the way good ones do, unhurried, a little reluctant to end. She talks about nostalgia being a form of love. About how the high highs and low lows are part of the same thing, and how you can’t really separate them, and how that’s what makes it all so powerful. About how she still has no idea what’s going on, and how her mum, who just turned 60, feels exactly the same way.

“I always feel like I have no idea what’s going on,” she says.

Nobody does, I tell her.

She grins. “That’s just how it is.”

Photographer: Silken Weinberg