Cat Burns has always had a way of making the smallest feelings sound enormous. Her songs have never relied on noise or gloss, they sit quietly, speak clearly, and hit straight where it hurts. Her second full-length album How To Be Human is no different; it’s a record about learning to live through heartbreak, grief, and growing pains, and somehow keeping your softness intact.
How To Be Human follows the success of her debut Early Twenties, which helped make Burns one of the UK’s most intimate new voices. That album was about figuring out adulthood; this one’s about surviving it. You can tell she’s been through things – loss, distance, the exhaustion of being constantly visible – but there’s strength in how she writes about them. Burns doesn’t dramatize pain; she sits with it until it becomes something tender.
The opener “Come Home”, feels like a conversation in the dark, just voice, guitar and the quiet confidence she’s known for. Then the songs begin to stretch out. “All This Love” aches beautifully, its chorus circling around grief that has nowhere to go. “GIRLS!”, on the other hand, is full of light, an easy, joyful ode to identity and queer pride that doesn’t feel forced or polished, just lived-in and happy. Burns has always known how to move between sadness and celebration without ever losing her centre.
Musically, How To Be Human sits somewhere between R&B, soul, and acoustic pop, but Burns never sounds like she’s chasing a sound. She makes each track feel homemade, even when the production swells – the kind of pop that’s quietly confident rather than trying too hard. There’s a looseness to it; even when a few songs veer close to the middle of the road, her voice brings them back to life.
The title track is one of her most personal songs to date, a reflection on masking, identity, and what it means to simply exist without apologising for it. You can hear her trying to work it out in real time, her voice cracking just enough to remind you she’s human too.
What makes How To Be Human so easy to return to is its honesty. There’s no grand concept, no overthinking, just an artist making sense of her world through melody. In a year filled with pop albums trying to reinvent themselves, Burns does the opposite; she slows things down, tells her truth, and trusts that’s enough.
By the time the record ends, you’re left with that rare thing in pop: calm. The feeling that someone finally said what you were too tired to say. How To Be Human is about finding peace, even when life doesn’t give you any.
