As well as being a bonafide popstar, Cat Burns is officially TV royalty – and not just because she smashed it on Celebrity Traitors.
I catch up with her the night after the Stranger Things 5 premiere, which we both attended, shortly after she performed on primetime Saturday night TV favourite Strictly Come Dancing. After quickly telling me that Millie Bobby Brown's Eleven is her favourite Stranger Things character (“she's just exactly who she thinks she is”), we get into what it was like to perform the title track from her new album How To Be Human in the iconic ballroom.
“I was trying not to look at the dancers because they were amazing,” Cat recalls. “I was like, 'Oh my gosh, they're dancing to my song. This is so strange.' But I then had to lock my brain back in place and make sure I didn't forget the words.”
If anyone knows how to lock themselves in, though, it's Cat. After all, she made it to the finale roundtable of arguably the defining reality TV series of 2025, Celebrity Traitors. Working alongside her fellow Traitors Alan Carr and Jonathan Ross, Cat flew under the radar with quite possibly the best on-screen poker face I've ever seen. More than that, she quietly highlighted the power of the neurodivergent perspective, both in and out of the game.
Now, she's out of the castle, and her new album How To Be Human – which was released shortly before the Traitors finale – reached number 5 in the Official Albums Chart, hitting number 1 on the Official Album Downloads Chart. This moment is all the more significant after Cat's viral TikTok campaign on the importance of topping the charts as a “quadruple homicider”. She initially posted this last year but brought attention back to the issue as her album began to climb the charts.
“I'm black, I'm gay, I'm autistic and I'm a woman,” she said. “How fab would it be if a quadruple homicider ended up in the top 10 charts… We can do it.” And it turns out, she did it.
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How To Be Human is a gorgeous piece of work in the way that it expands across Cat's experiences of grief and heartbreak. She explains that she was influenced by musicals like Miss Saigon and Hamilton while writing. “I think musicals are the best because there's a beginning and an end,” Cat explained, adding that she wanted her album to follow the same narrative.
She sat down to discuss how her neurodivergence helped her game as a Traitor, as well as how it helped her to depict grief and heartbreak on her new album, and what it truly means to her to be a “quadruple homicider” topping the charts.
Glamour: How does How To Be Human differ for you as a body of work from your debut album, Early Twenties?
Cat: I's kind of a snapshot of the last year of my life. So from April 2024 to April 2025. It was a real learning curve for me, navigating grief as a neurodivergent person and throwing it all onto the paper in terms of writing, it just feeling like a story. It feels like a little musical of how you get your life back.
Glamour: There’s a lot about both heartbreak and grief on the album, and your recent Instagram post about dealing with grief and loss after a life milestone like moving into your first home was so impactful.
Cat: I think any big life achievements, any big moments when you've lost someone is always going to be bittersweet, especially because you'll be happy that you've achieved this massive thing, but then also really sad that this person's not there to witness it. I think I wanted to show that all grief is love and love that you can't get to that person, and love that you feel like you can't receive from that person anymore. And I wanted to show that it shows itself in in every form.
Glamour: What do you hope neurodivergent people take from the album when it comes to grief?
Cat: I hope that neurodivergent people realise that it's okay to feel those big feelings that we have – we feel our emotions really intensely. If we're really happy, we're really happy, you know, and if we're really sad, we're really sad. And I think it's important to let people be really sad, because as intense and crazy as those emotions can feel, when you're really feeling them, it will pass.
I think it's something like 90 seconds we're actually crying for, but it's the stories that we attach to them and the things we tell ourselves that make it feel like they last a bit longer. So I think for neurodivergent people, it's just to say you're allowed to feel your feelings, and feel them to the fullest extent, and they'll pass.
Glamour: You’ve said before that your creative process very much has your ADHD at the centre of it, can you tell me a bit about that when it comes to making music?
Cat: I'm not a very metaphorical person. I don't really understand metaphors that much. What you see is what you get, [I'm a ] what it says on the tin type of person. And I think the lyrics [are] honest, very blunt and very clear because I want anybody to be able to listen to it and understand exactly what it is I'm talking about, even if it's a specific situation.
Glamour: How do you feel about getting back out there on tour?
Cat: I'm really excited mainly to just see how I can, in the most intimate, beautiful way, share this vulnerable album to a lovely audience who might also be grieving and going through their own problems. I'm just really excited to experience the album with people and just see what their favourites are, what they sing along to, what they cry to, and just try and make it as safe as a space as possible for people.
Glamour: Let's talk Celebrity Traitors. What would you say is the top thing you learned about yourself on the show?
Cat: Actually, I learned that I can speak to people I don't know, something I definitely struggle with, especially small talk. I'm just not good at it, and I think being around so many people, that's what you're kind of forced to do at the start. So I taught myself that I can do it, and it's also kind of muscle memory getting used to small talk. So I was kind of training myself on how to do that, and I think I learned a lot from there and other people. I'm a very inquisitive person anyway, so it was nice to learn more about people's lives, away from what the media might say or what they're known to be as – just actually who they are and what they to do on a day-to-day basis, what they enjoy, things like that. It was really nice to get to know everybody.
Glamour: What was one of the standout funny moments from filming for you?
Cat: Celia's fart was the best thing ever, because we just weren't expecting it. We were ready to do the mission, we were a bit scared in the cabin. And then Claudia [Winkleman] walks in and [Celia] farts, and we all just started laughing. I think it was nice, because you can see us as a whole throughout the whole series, we did just laugh a lot… It was just so funny.
Glamour: Are you still in touch with your fellow Traitors?
Cat: We have a group chat. So we all chat in the group chat every day. I think it's called “Traitors aren't bad, they're just misunderstood”. Jonathan [Ross] made that and we all chat in it every day. We tell each other what we're doing, Stephen [Fry] has got his play on, so we'll try and see if we can go to that. We all got on really well, so it's really nice.
Glamour: Your TikTok campaign to get yourself top of the charts as a “quadruple homicider” – being Black, a woman, gay and autistic – has succeeded. How does that feel?
Cat: Amazing. I hit so many different intersectionalities, so I don't necessarily want to be or think that I am a role model, but the facts are I do hit all of those four different categories. It's just not that common for that to happen. So I was really wanting it to happen, to show other people that it can happen.
I think as a lot of people always say, they do it for the younger generation, and for younger people to be able to see themselves and people in the public eye to be able to go, “Okay, this is something I could do". I can make pop music as well, and my brain works differently, but it works perfectly in the creative space. So this is something I can do as well”.
Glamour: We interviewed Flowerovlove for Glamour’s Women of the Year awards and she has spoken out a lot about Black women being stereotyped in the pop music space – what has that looked like for you?
Cat: Luckily now, people are really good at saying I'm a pop artist and making sure that they say I do pop music. But I think early on in my career, maybe before Go blew up, there was still a blurred line and people were saying [I did] R&B.
Glamour: It's all about the immediate assumption…
Cat: Yeah, and pushing past that.
Glamour: What makes you feel empowered?
Cat: Crying. I just think it's the best thing to do. If I'm overwhelmed, I cry. If I'm sad, I cry, and I usually feel better after I cry, just let myself really feel my emotions, because they're there to be felt. If you don't feel them, you make yourself sick. So I think it's very powerful to let yourself feel and not resist.
How To Be Human is available to buy and stream. You can shop Amazon's Black Friday Week deals now.
