Cat Burns

Streatham, gospel, and a garden shed in Croydon

Catrina Burns-Temison was born in Streatham, south London, on 6 June 2000, to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father, and was raised by her mother alongside her sister after the two separated. The first music in the house was gospel — Kirk Franklin, Donnie McClurkin, Marvin Sapp — and the guitar-led writing came later, drawn from Tracy Chapman as much as from Destiny's Child and Anne-Marie. She has described the result as pop with a cooler edge: indie-leaning acoustic arrangements sung in her own south London accent rather than a borrowed American one.

She attended the BRIT School in Croydon, and at sixteen recorded her first EP, Adolescent, in a fellow pupil's garden shed studio. No label was interested, so she released it herself in October 2016. A second EP, Naïve, arrived in May 2019. That is four years of work before anything resembling a career, and it matters to how she talks about the one that followed — the rise was slow enough that she can date every stage of it.

'go', and the two years it took to become a hit

Burns wrote and first put out 'go' in 2020. What made it a chart record was the lockdown that followed: posting covers and originals to TikTok through 2020, she watched the song spread without a marketing budget behind it, and the attention brought a deal with Since '93, the RCA imprint she still records for. The chart run came a full two years after the release. In 2022 'go' reached number two on the UK singles chart, kept off the top by Harry Styles's 'As It Was', and it has since been certified double platinum in the UK and platinum in New Zealand.

The years either side were spent opening for other acts and learning rooms she could not yet sell on her own — Olly Alexander's Night Call tour and Ed Sheeran's Mathematics stadium run in 2022, then Sam Smith's Gloria the Tour in 2023. She played Later… with Jools Holland in May 2022 and returned for the Hootenanny at the end of that year. 'Home for My Heart', with ArrDee, reached number 35 in March 2023, and she sang on Sam Smith's 'Perfect' alongside Jessie Reyez the same year. Three BRIT nominations followed in 2023 — Rising Star, British Pop/R&B Act and Song of the Year for 'go' — and she placed fourth in BBC Radio 1's Sound of 2023.

Two albums, and the distance between them

The debut, early twenties, came out on 12 July 2024 through Since '93 and RCA. Seventeen tracks and over an hour long, it took the obvious brief literally: romantic wreckage, self-examination and practical advice from someone still in the middle of it. It reached number seven in the UK and was shortlisted for the 2024 Mercury Prize. Reviews were warm about the singing and sceptical about the sequencing — the recurring note was that a shorter record would have been a better one, and that the length made it feel as though it were trying to serve several audiences at once.

How to Be Human, released on 31 October 2025, is the corrective: sixteen tracks in forty-eight minutes, and a single subject. It is built around loss — her father died on Christmas Day 2020, her grandfather in April 2024 — and around what she has learned about processing it since being diagnosed with ADHD at 21 and autism at 22, which she made public in April 2023. The lead single 'Come Home' carries a voice note from her late grandfather. Five singles ran ahead of it: 'GIRLS!' on 29 January 2025, 'All This Love' on 15 August, 'Lavender' on 12 September, 'There's Just Something About Her' on 26 September and 'Please Don't Hate Me' on 17 October.

It went to number five in the UK, her highest album placing. Critics split on the packaging rather than the material — Rolling Stone UK called it a portrait of processing grief, Beats Per Minute credited her with telling her truth and trusting that to be enough, while The Arts Desk found the production heavily over-engineered for songs that did not need it.

A television year, and the tour she moved

The album landed in the middle of the most-watched month of her career for reasons that had nothing to do with music. The Celebrity Traitors began on BBC One on 8 October 2025 with Burns as one of the three original Traitors, alongside Alan Carr. She played it as a plotter, survived to the final five, and was voted out by the faithfuls Joe Marler, Nick Mohammed and David Olusoga; Carr went on to win.

On 31 October 2025, the day the album came out, she postponed the November UK tour to April 2026. Her stated reason was that the build-up had been more intense than anyone had expected and that she wanted to be well enough to give audiences a night worth the money. Tickets were carried over; Wolverhampton could not be rebooked and was replaced with a Birmingham date. Speaking to Stylist on 21 November 2025 she framed the decision as a limit rather than a retreat — that it is acceptable to say no, and that no is a full sentence.

Since then the year has been quieter and steadier. On 3 July 2026 she was given the Pride Icon Award at the PEUGEOT Attitude PRIDE Awards Europe, where she spoke about grief not going away so much as becoming something learned to live with, and about the years she spent masking, when the only time she did not feel anxious was alone. In late April 2026 she announced her first headline Australian run.

What the show is now

The How to Be Human tour ran from 31 October 2025 to 19 April 2026 across thirteen UK shows, most of them the rescheduled April dates. The Birmingham O2 Academy show on 10 April 2026 ran from 9pm to 10.15pm: a seventeen-song main set followed by a four-song encore, with 'Come Home', 'Can Time Move Faster?', 'Today' and 'Gemini' all played live for the first time.

The Brixton finale on 19 April was sold out and twenty songs long. The staging was a domestic set rather than a production — rugs, house plants, low lamps and a sofa she sat on to talk between songs. The album was played close to front-to-back before the older material arrived at the end, which is an unusual order of business for a room that size and a deliberate one. She told the audience she had been in tears that morning: it was two years to the day since her grandfather died. The set closed on 'go', sung back at her at volume, and included an unreleased track, 'Is It That Deep'. VIP ticket-holders got a four-song soundcheck of earlier material — 'live more & love more', 'alone', 'anxiety' and 'know that you're not alone'.

The October 2026 Australian dates are the first test of that show outside Britain: The Rechabite in Perth on 14 October, The Tivoli in Brisbane on 16 October, the Enmore Theatre in Sydney on 17 October and the Forum in Melbourne on 18 October.