Holly Humberstone’s second album Cruel World arrives April 10, and the lead singles suggest she’s done something genuinely difficult: she made a pop record that earns every element of pop it uses.

“Die Happy” opens with an ominous synth swell before settling into something more conventional, but the lyrical content, heavy with lovesickness and mortality imagery, sits in persistent tension with the accessibility of the production. “To Love Somebody” is an out-of-body feeling put into music, which is what Humberstone does better than most of her contemporaries: she takes the specific texture of emotional experience and finds a sonic equivalent without explaining it away.

The album’s framework is gothic fairytale, Victorian theatre, unearthed childhood objects. It’s a more elaborate conceptual frame than her 2023 debut Paint My Bedroom Black attempted, and from what the singles show, she can sustain it. There’s a track called “Drunk Dialling” that uses woozy synths to capture a feeling everyone knows and nobody wants to admit they know. There’s “Lucy,” addressed to a female friend in that direct mode her listeners have responded to since her early EPs.

Humberstone has been explicit about wanting to make pop songs on this record, which is a different ambition than her earlier work. The dark alt-pop of Paint My Bedroom Black was excellent but it was also guarded, music that kept a certain distance. Cruel World sounds like someone deciding to close that distance and see what happens when the songs are more open.

The 12-track album runs about 38 minutes. It’s out April 10 on Polydor.