Holly Humberstone has released the video for her new single, “Room Service” today. Written while she was touring around the world last year, traveling from non-descript room to room and missing loved ones, the song captures the feeling of watching their lives on phone screens. The video was shot in room 627 on a webcam, the same London hotel room that Holly invited 80 fans to hear songs for the first time from her highly anticipated debut album, Paint My Bedroom Black, out October 13 2023. Inspired by early zoom calls where Holly’s world felt blurry and faraway, the video captures a day in the life of Holly on tour, trying to find normality and home in the mundane, locked away from the world in a hotel room.
Holly Humberstone said of the song, “I wrote Room Service a little while ago when I’d just started touring full time. I was finding myself constantly stressed out and although I was having fun, I was really missing home and my friends. I felt like I was watching them live out their lives from a phone screen, like I was being left behind. There was this swelling feeling that I was growing apart from that world that I was missing so badly, and I just didn’t want to be forgotten. AlI I wanted to do was to get a hotel room with my best friend, lock the world out and do stupid stuff like order room service. To me, this song is a simple love song to the people I care about the most, and the seemingly basic experiences you share together that can so often be taken for granted. The busier I get, the more I treasure the precious time I get with my friends and family; the more I value them in my life.”
Holly Humberstone
One half of the Grantham-born singer and songwriter’s double-A side singles along with the heartbreak ballad “Antichrist”, the juxtaposition of both songs – the light and dark – reflect Holly’s introspection and extraversion. The introduction of these two starkly different tracks act as a revolving door into the visceral duality of Holly Humberstone.
With a prowess for capturing and characterizing moments that are both uncomfortably intimate and brutally revealing in her songwriting and creative – most of Holly’s 2022 was spent in hotel rooms, stuck between places, watching life from afar rather than being totally present in it. Lacking real connections and missing loved ones, the stirring official video for “Antichrist”, directed by Jean-Charles Chavarin, tells the story of the self-flagellation that comes with hurting someone you love, as you run away from yourself, trying to escape from room to room, until your reflection turns away from you.