Holly Humberstone shares ‘The Walls Are Way Too Thin’
British indie-pop singer-songwriter Holly Humberstone has released her latest single, ‘The Walls Are Way Too Thin’.
“I wrote ‘The Walls Are Way Too Thin’ about a time in my life when I felt like I’d lost control of where I was heading and struggling to find my place in the world,” Humberstone explains. “I’d just moved to a small London flat and felt claustrophobic and alone. To avoid confronting how I was feeling I’d sneak out the flat and go on train journeys to see my mates, get drunk, then come back hungover through the night and early hours. I wrote most of the Walls and the songs that come next on those trains. It was my place of therapy, in the middle of nowhere, constantly moving with no destination.”
I quite enjoyed Humbestone’s ‘Haunted House’ when it came out earlier in the year. She’s self-aware enough to label her own Spotify playlist as ‘same old sad songs’, and most of her songs do fall into that sort of emo-pop space that is great to play when you feel like you’re stuck in your mind and can’t get out.
Still, ‘The Walls Are Way Too Thin’ plays things a little more upbeat. There’s still tension, close misses, and anxieties all around, but musically Humberstone breaks out of the slow-sad-repeat style that had started to become her signature sound. Instead, the heady doomed imagery is paired with a bouncy electronic beat that keeps the song from falling into its own sad-sack trappings.
“I wanted the music video to reflect how I felt stuck in my room with my own internal anxiety rising,” she continues. “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!”
Check out the video for ‘The Walls Are Way Too Thin’ down below.
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