Jenny Hollingworth (1/2 of musical duo Let's Eat Grandma) announces solo project 'Jenny on Holiday'
Half of the experimental pop-duo Let's Eat Grandma, Jenny Hollingworth, has announced she will be releasing music from her "own project" under the name Jenny on Holiday. Keep up to date by following Jenny on Holiday here: linktr.ee/jennyonholiday
She shared the below message on socials:
"Hey it’s Jenny! I wanted to tell you that I’ve been working on some solo stuff recently and have made an account you can follow to keep up to date with it all!
We’ll be back as LEG but for now, Rosa and I have been working on our own projects we can’t wait to share with you all 💝
You can follow me on @jennyonholiday_"
It feels like the last few years weren’t supposed to go like this for Let’s Eat Grandma. 2018’s I’m All Ears was a triumph, an album made only more impressive by the fact that its auteurs were teenagers. Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton were getting good reviews and audiences, not to mention living out the dream of many by being in a band with their best friend from early childhood. The factors that make the new Two Ribbons less a victory lap and more a hard-fought new peak in the duo’s oeuvre are a combination of the achingly quotidian and the nightmarishly rare. On the one hand, as their teen years were ending, the pair, friends since age four, found themselves on slightly different wavelengths for the first time (recalibrating from which, as anyone with long-lasting enough childhood friendships can attest, can be a painful and tricky process). And on the other Hollingworth’s boyfriend died at the age of 22. Amazingly enough, Two Ribbons is neither the sound of Hollingworth and Watson paralyzed by these varying levels of grief, anger, loneliness and guilt nor them pretending like everything was or is okay. It’s almost incidental that this is also their best album and one of the best synth pop records of the year.
This may be a record partly about mourning and dislocation, and one that doesn’t hesitate to acknowledge the more difficult parts of the situations that the duo went through (it’s simply never going to feel right to lose someone that young, even if your friendship heals and deepens you’ll never quite have that telepathic childhood closeness), but there’s far more than gloom here. The opening “Happy New Year” basks in the joy of repair, the chorus beaming “and nothing that was broken can touch how much I care for you,” while “Levitation” is the most effervescent song you’re likely to hear about disassociating on the bathroom floor. And while the increased level of compositional and sonic polish is to be expected from still-young artists getting increasingly used to their form (especially with fewer outside collaborators, this time the whole record produced by the band and David Wrench throughout) there’s still plenty of their vivid inventiveness, whether it’s the bit that gives “Insect Loop” it’s title or the way “Hall of Mirrors” evokes the way a crush can make your head swim.
For the first time Walton and Hollingworth wrote songs separately to begin with here, although they still crisscross vocally and worked on each other’s. If Walton, with “Happy New Year” and “Hall of Mirrors,” gets some of the biggest moments, Hollingworth takes lead on some of the more devastating ones. The closing title track is a gorgeously sad reckoning with changing friendships and lost partners, one that acknowledges the pain that can’t be dismissed and the people who are still there to love. But maybe the key track here is the wrenching, soaring “Watching You Go,” a song about both the determination to live in the face of loss and the immense, consuming anger that we sometimes have to wrestle with to do so, eventually cracking the sky with guitar in order to release it. Two Ribbons is the kind of great record that you kind of wish the artists never had to make.
