When they were 10 years old, Rosa Walton and Jenny
Hollingworth were hanging out at the top of the stairs. Bored. Flopped over the
banister. In unison, they began to sing: ‘When you don’t know what to do / And
you’re feeling kinda blue…’ “And then my mum came along and said, ‘Get that leg
off the banister!’” says Jenny. “And we went: ‘Get that leg off the banister!
And you’ll know just what to do, d-d-doo, d-d-doo.’” Rosa and Jenny sing out
the jazzy tune as they snap their fingers. They laugh hard, as they have done
all day. If ‘Get That Leg Off The Banister’ wasn’t Let’s Eat Grandma’s very
first song, it was ‘The Angry Chicken’, written with the aid of Rosa’s
thirteenth birthday present – a guitar – and inspired by her chicken-shaped
alarm clock. Jenny played along on her out-of-tune ukulele.
Bored kids, amusing themselves with literal ditties –
it was all of us once; with a friend that we would have died without, if we
were lucky. Yet Rosa and Jenny – now 16 and 17, respectively – seem even closer
than that.
They’re not the identical twins that they’re so often
mistaken for, or even sisters, although they’re happy to propel the myth with
matching clothes and all that hair that’s got people comparing them to the
sinister apparitions from The Shining. It’s precisely because they’re so
inseparable… and because they want to fuck with people. They met in reception
class, aged 4, and say they felt a special connection from the beginning. “Even
when we’ve had other friends, we’ve always been separate from everyone else,”
says Jenny. Rosa recalls play times at school spent “just the two of us,
wandering around in our own world, playing games with stones and planning our
escape from the playground – we used to think, ooh, we’re going to climb over
the fence and then go to this place. I think the whole creation of our own
world, which we use in our music, started from that young age.”
Year on year, at Jenny’s birthday parties, the two of
them would eat their food away from the other children. Jenny’s sister might
have been allowed to join them (Rosa is an only child), but everyone else sat
on the other side of the table. Invited friends, but not Rosa. “We’ve got loads
of photos and videos of Jenny’s birthdays over the years where we’re on our
own, and every year it was like, ‘oh, this again…’”
It’s to their credit that they’re even in touch now
that they’re young women, especially since they’ve not schooled together since
they were both 7. At that time they vowed to meet up every 2 weeks, which might
as well be a year when it’s your number 1 friend and you’re upgrading to middle
school. I made similar arrangements with friends at the end of high school –
I’ve not seen Keith Howgego since.
Today, they’ve got plenty of other friends, but none
that are mutual. They either hang out just them, or totally separately. “I feel
like that would be a weird dynamic, if we hung out with other people,” says
Jenny, who describes Rosa as a daredevil. “I think that’s what appealed to me
about her. I’ve always been a bit more cautious and sensitive, and Rosa
balances me out. But we have the same creative ideas and imaginations. It’s
almost like, where all the games we used to play was just us and nobody was
watching, now it’s exactly the same but the difference is that there are lots
of people looking in.”
Rosa and Jenny bluster across Eaton Park towards our
meeting point by the bandstand. It was snowing in Norwich before we arrived;
now it’s slate grey with interchangeable spells of icy rain and sudden blue
skies. They laugh off the cold as soon as they reach us and break into song
while we’re still shaking hands. “I’m Jenny” prompts a blast of ‘Jenny From The
Block’ from Rosa and another song that I don’t know, but think has been
spontaneously made up on the spot. It triggers more laughter, and so sets a happy
pattern for the rest of the day – they burst into song and laugh a lot, and the
rest of us (photographer, PR, stylist and hair and makeup artist) try to keep
up. I can see how their other friends might not get a look in when Rosa and
Jenny are together – they seem capable of speaking to one another with a
glance, although that’s not to say that they’re not inclusive, and both are
mindful to explain private jokes whenever it feels like they’re the only two
giggling away. Like when they’re doing their surreal musical bit ‘Jenny Feat.
The Dying Cat’, where Jenny strikes up a popular song and Rosa deliberately
harmonises off-key. They demonstrate it to me with a rendition of James Blunt’s
‘Your Beautiful’. At the end they always sign off in a cod Chinese accent
promoting whatever big has happened to them recently – today it’s “When you’re
on the cover of Loud And Quiet.” They fall about.
We walk to the model boating lake and Jenny makes
chit-chat by telling me how Eaton Park reminds her of being sick, after Rosa
once made her take part in the weekly 5k run that’s held here at weekends.
“Sorry,” she says, in one of a number of self-aware moments, “I don’t know why
I’m telling you about the time I ran around the park constantly throwing up.”
She excitedly plays music on her phone while we
photograph her and Rosa by the lake. She opts for a guy called Macintosh Plus
and introduces me to an ambient micro genre called vaporwave. It reminds me
that this is how teenagers listen to music, and that Let’s Eat Grandma are
teenagers themselves. Rosa and Jenny aren’t ashamed of the fact, but they are
aware of the risk of being treated as a novelty because of it. The truth is
that they are all the best bits of being 16 and 17– quite mad, instantly
confident and out to please themselves. And positioned here, squarely between
adulthood and childhood, they’re awarded that unique free pass on dipping into
either world whenever they like. So they sing James Blunt like dying cats, use
the word ‘gourmet’ where we used to say ‘sick’ and repeat the saxophone hook
from ‘Careless Whisper’ over and over, but they also eloquently voice their
concerns about the British education system and the institutional sexism of the
music industry that’s led them to explain to Sound Engineers that yes, they are
the drummers in the band, even though they are girls. At one point, halfway
through our sit-down interview, Rosa suddenly asked me if she can give a shout
out to someone called Arthur Dellow. Then we’re straight back to the importance
of challenging pop music archetypes. It’s a happy, lawless, disparate existence
that’s fun to be around, and it’s had a direct and positive affect on the music
Let’s Eat Grandma make.
Their debut single, ‘Deep Six Textbook’, has led most
people to say the same thing – “At last, something a little bit different” –
but they have no idea. ‘Deep Six Textbook’ is a down-tempo, slightly
psychedelic alt. pop number full of wide open space and pinned on a drum track
played somewhere in the middle distance. The girls’ vocals are just witchy
enough for Kate Bush to be thrown in to most online summations and reposts, and
this already beguiling single now comes with a video that piles on the weird as
Rosa and Jenny tumble around a deserted beach in slow motion, dressed in the finest
Victorian-ghost-children lace dresses. The stats on their Facebook page have a
majority of their fans marked as 45- to 50-year-old men, but only half of LEG’s
debut album (coming early summer via Transgressive Records) is in a remotely
similar vein.
Following tracks include a deep synth banger called
‘Eat Shiitake Mushrooms’, featuring cute J-pop vocals and girlish rapping – the
kind of song that PC Music have been trying to land on radio playlists for the
last two years. There’s the distorted stromp of ‘Sax In The City’, too,
‘Chocolate Sludge Cake’, which features a pagan-sounding school recorder and
pat-a-cake singsong, and a beautifully harmonized folk song accompanied by a
mandolin, entitled ‘Chimpanzees in Canopies’. It’s a record that features no
sampled instruments or extra musicians – every keyboard, guitar, drum,
saxophone, harmonica, mandolin, cello, recorder, glockenspiel and ukulele was
played by Rosa and Jenny, practically in a different, strange style on each of
the 10 experimental tracks.
“Because we were listening to so much pop music we
worked out the aspects we liked but also what we didn’t like from pop music,”
says Rosa. “For example, if you listen to a whole album of pop, it gets really
samey, and that was the point where we thought how about we make an album where
every song is in a different style.
“We can’t wait for people to hear ‘Eat Shiitake
Mushrooms’, because they’ve got us pinned as these creepy girls, which is how
we’ve been presenting ourselves. But another part of our whole creepy thing is
partly about not conforming to stereotypes. A lot of people do expect females
in the music industry to be docile and acoustic and we’re not either of those
things.”
“The aim is to create a really strong response from
people,” adds Jenny, “and that’s why it’s really fun having really jumpy
tracks, because people are like ‘What!?’, and we’re like, ‘Yeaaah!’ As female
artists, and especially young ones, you get so many people who think you’re
going to sit down and play some folk, and then we bring the big synths in…
“When people talk about emotions they talk about them
as if they’re really clear cut, and they’re really not like that,” she says.
“From when we talk about how we feel about things, it’s really difficult to
tell exactly how you feel. It’s conflicting and confusing, and I guess that’s
how it comes across as scary sometimes. And that’s how the album’s ended up
pretty dark.”
Its payoff is a closing ukulele rendition of the
opening ‘Deep Six Textbook’ – the darling version you’d hear on an advert of an
online dating site. “That’s like, ‘we’re teenage girls,’” says Jenny. “‘You
thought we’d be doing this throughout the whole album but here it is right at
the end, just to make you feel more secure.’”
When the rain really starts to come down in Easton
Park we jump in a taxi to an artists’ studio in the centre of town. It’s just
gone 3pm and the school Rosa left last year has recently kicked out. A kid she
knows called Kyle is walking home, which instigates more laughter as we zip by.
Rosa and Jenny are themselves enrolled in music
college, where Let’s Eat Grandma counts towards their final grade. It’s called
Access To Music and it’s where they recorded their album while they were still
finishing their GCSEs. The facilities are a major perk, while the curriculum is
based around how genres develop and a more experimental approach to
composition. Rosa says that it’s important for them to be in the company of
other teenagers, too, “otherwise you feel really separated.”
When I ask them how their music fits in with the other
students’ they say that it doesn’t – there are a lot of traditional band
setups.
Once the A&R clamour was over (and LEG really did
have their pick of the indies) and Rosa and Jenny had signed with
Transgressive, they tried to keep their new deal to themselves. Their
classmates found out online, and were unanimously supportive. Still, it must
feel strange for Rosa and Jenny – young adults enrol in music college as a step
towards life as a jobbing musician, in one form or other; they’d managed it
within five months of their first year. So what of college now? Rosa is still
hopeful that they’ll be able to complete their second year, but doesn’t appear
too confident that their commitment to the band will allow it.
“I think it’s weird,” explains Jenny, “because
compared to other people at college our goal has been quite different because
we never thought that we wanted to be musicians – we just want to learn more
and improve. Even though we’re doing the musician job now, we’re still working
towards our goal because there’s always more to learn. Other people are aiming
for the job route, but we’re aiming for the learning process.”
College is a good place to start, but Jenny says that
she learns just as much online, “reading about different murder cases and
stuff. That’s not doing anything for this creepy thing, is it?” she laughs. “Or
reading posts about science, micro genres and interior design.”
“We’re really into education, we just hate school,”
says Rosa. “The school system, they’ve just got it wrong, basically.”
“I feel like a lot of young people don’t feel
fulfilled doing what they’re doing, but they feel so much pressure to do that,”
adds Jenny. “It’s so nice to create something so freeing. For example, in the album
if you literally just pick up all the places that are mentioned, they’re not
real places, and it’s freeing to not feel like you’re in real life anymore.”
She continues: “Some of my friends are such amazing
people, and it almost upsets me because I feel like things have made them feel
like they’re not good at anything. I really don’t know how to apply that to
culture these days, or anything, but I love learning, and the way [the
education system] works, it really puts people down. I’ve nothing against
learning, which is why we go to college, but it’s about the way you teach, to
make sure people feel as though they can do things.”
‘Deep Six Textbook’, although cryptic in its title
(“Deep Six” is an old nautical term for throwing something overboard, and has
come to mean the disposing of something so that it’s impossible to recover), is
these feelings of disenchantment set to beautiful, foreboding music. “We live
our lives in the textbook / Letter by letter / I feel like standing on the desk
and screaming ‘I don’t care’ / And I was such a quiet child.”
“That track can be applied to different things in
society, but we were studying for our GCSEs at the time,” says Rosa. “For us,
it was about the education system – the expectations of it and that there’s
this certain path you have to follow.”
Forums and reviewers will soon enough be able to pore
over Let’s Eat Grandma’s other lyrics for meaning and secret messages, but it’s
an impossible puzzle to solve. It’s a thin line between abstract words with
poignant backstories and literal, weird imagery that’s been written by a band
when they were 14, nonsensical and amusing only themselves. Sometimes a slug is
a slug, as is the case on ‘Chocolate Sludge Cake’, which is also literally
about cakes and fridges. As Jenny describes it, “It’s the playful music people
expect young people to make, because we were even younger when we wrote that,
but it’s got this synth base that tricks people.”
Rosa confirms that ‘Sleep’ – a truly creepy
netherworld waltz with jabbering, hard-to-decipher words – is purposefully
abstract, because it was written subconsciously halfway between being awake and
asleep, but the pair stop themselves from talking about any other tracks. They
want to experience the glee of seeing so many people get it wrong, and I can
hardly blame them.
This is Let’s Eat Grandma’s own world, where nothing
has changed since ‘Get That Leg Off The Banister’, or perhaps even earlier,
when Rosa and Jenny met in reception class. They refer to LEG as “just another
one of our projects”, like the spy movies they used to make and tree houses
they used to build and the time they had a spa day in their swimming costumes
in the bath. By performing only to one another, without the hang-ups that
separate adults from teenagers, they’ve allowed themselves to indulge their frivolities
as they explore the darker sounds of experimental pop music. Lot’s of people
are now looking in, but it’s all the same to them.
I’m not surprised that the only time they’re stumped
all day is when I ask them what they’d like the band to achieve. It’s an alien
question, as if being together with music isn’t achievement enough.
“That’s what they asked us at the bank and we don’t
know,” Rosa finally says. “If we go to a house party and someone plays ‘Eat
Shiitake Mushrooms’, that would be success to me.”
On the roof of the artists’ studio, they dance and
sing to Michael Jackson playing on Jenny’s phone.
Let’s Eat Grandma have never needed anyone other than
themselves. By Stuart Stubbs . Loud and Quiet
March 26 , 2016
Let’s Eat Grandma began writing their debut album I,
Gemini (Transgressive) at age 13, but when they released it in June of this
year—in the throes of late teenhood—they sounded anything but juvenile. The
English duo consists of Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton, who bonded over
drawing at age 4 and have been friends ever since. They craft subversive,
unflinching experimental pop that includes nearly three-minute long
instrumental intros and bouts of rap. Disguised in their child-like vocals is a
dark, playful lyricism, with musings about mushrooms and the monotony of
everyday life.
It’s difficult to believe Walton when she tells us
that their style was “quite slow to develop,” as together they see a gap in
mainstream pop and know just how to fill it. From their band name—which has a
noteworthy missing comma (guess where it goes)—to their hand-drawn album
artwork, their vision is clear: strip away the saccharine.
Currently, Hollingworth and Walton are doubling up
their duties: they’re completing their final year of high school while working
on their second album, which is expected in 2017. After graduation they’ll
perform at three European festivals. Back at the start of fall in New York,
Interview met Hollingworth and Walton the day after their first-ever US
performance; we spoke about pop music, fairy tales, and growing up.
THE BASICS: Jenny Hollingworth, age 18; Rosa Walton,
age 17.
BORN & BASED: Norwich, England.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS: Jenny Hollingworth: I thought Rosa
was quite creative and fun.
Rosa Walton: [laughs] Did you actually think that when
you were four?
Hollingworth: Yeah! The thing is, she started talking
to me about drawing.
Walton: Did I? I must admit, I don’t remember it very
clearly.
Hollingworth: I think you don’t really analyze things
so much when you’re really little, but I reckon if I actually think back to it,
when you’re a kid you want to hang out with people because they’re fun, don’t
you? Basically we were both friends because we’d go along with each other’s
shenanigans.
BACK TO THE BEGINNING: Hollingworth: I don’t think I
ever even considered music as something I could be good at. I got dragged into
recorder practice class—Rosa and me did when we were little. I always enjoyed
music, but I know loads of other people are like, “Oh, I want to be a pop
star!” But I never even considered it.
Walton: A lot of kids, they really like singing and
stuff like that, and think, “I want to be a pop star so I can sing,” but I
could never sing in tune as a kid at all. I had to properly train myself. [But]
it was never really about that, even though our music is quite focused on
vocals.
Hollingworth: I think the first thing I got into was
singing, but writing before singing; we didn’t really start writing until we
were 13, but we did write a couple of things together before then. I like
singing, because when you’re a kid and you don’t know music theory it’s the
easiest way to write. It’s way easier than using a keyboard, because you just
sing it out of your mouth. It’s still so easy when you hear a song, if you’re
listening to something without a melody, you can come up with melodies just
like that. You don’t have to bother getting anything out.
FAIRY TALES (BROTHERS GRIMM, NOT DISNEY):
Hollingworth: We’ve always noticed the façade that’s in a lot of mainstream pop
music of this super sweet, happy world that doesn’t really tie up with reality.
I guess it has a purpose, it’s divisive, but for us, we’ve always been into
things like horror films and dark stories—also dark music to a certain extent.
It has a bit more of a story to tell. People can relate more—like, if you’re in
a bad mood, and somebody puts on a really happy album, it’s just going to make
you really fucking annoyed. [laughs]
I think there’s something about the way that stories
are passed through word of mouth that’s very interesting, and also the fact
that loads of these stories have been altered to make them more commercial,
just like how things can be in the lyrics of pop music. It’s kind of a
parallel, not that we don’t love pop music—there are so many aspects of it that
are great—[but] sometimes it’s almost like people are trying to push themselves
as the cool thing that is dark, when in reality it’s nothing like what most
people’s lives are like. Not that fairytales are or that our music is. It’s
just a bit superficial sometimes.
KEEPING IT ONE-ON-ONE: Walton: We don’t write sections
separately; we write it together, then there might be a certain bit where we go
away and it develop it. We didn’t play [our album] to anyone except each other,
really. We just kept it between ourselves.
PERFORMANCE ART: Hollingworth: I think we were always
interested in the theatrical element of performance.
Walton: Definitely—that’s an important part of it to
us.
Hollingworth: You can’t really stare down the audience
if no one’s there. [both laugh]
Walton: Then we’d just stare at each other as we play.
Hollingworth: I think they’re hyperbolized versions
[of ourselves onstage]—aspects of our personalities.
Walton: Like different parts of us—
Hollingworth: But really extreme.
A NEW POINT OF VIEW: Hollingworth: Because we wrote
[the songs on I, Gemini] when we were a lot younger, when we’re talking in
interviews especially, sometimes what we were thinking about when we wrote them
differs from now. Because obviously as you grow older, especially when you’re a
teenager, your perspective on life changes so much.
Walton: In such a short amount of time.
Hollingworth: So it’s quite hard to try and think back
to what your mindset was then.
Walton: Because it’s so different.
Hollingworth: So sometimes, there’s a bit of the delay
in how we’ve developed musically and also as people.
WRITING FROM EXPERIENCE: Hollingworth: I think that’s
quite valuable, because a lot of people can relate to it, but for us… You have
to be strong to do that, in a way, because it’s kind of baring your soul.
Walton: I think also we do do that, but our lyrics are
quite cryptic, so people often don’t know what it really means. But it is that
underneath.
Hollingworth: It’s like diary writing but with a guard
up.
Walton: So it’s meaningful to us, but then for other
people, they’re like, “Oh, that’s just a load of nonsense about, I don’t know,
mushrooms.” [both laugh]
Hollingworth: Also, we get a lot of visual images that
relate to our emotions, so for us, sometimes there’s a lot of feeling behind an
image or a metaphor or something that we talk about.
Walton: It’s emotional, but…
Hollingworth: But it doesn’t necessarily seem like
that. So in a way, it is quite personal.
FIGHTING CONVENTION: Walton: People often stereotype
us because we’re young and we’re girls. They think that we should look twin-y
and girly and baby-ish, in a way, and that’s not us at all.
Hollingworth: Yeah. We had a kind of dark thing going
when we first wrote the album, and they’ve twisted it into this really girly
thing that we never had, and we’ve gone away from that naturally, anyway.
Walton: Because we’ve grown up.
The Subversive Duo.
By Haley Weiss. Interview Magazine , December
13, 2016
KEXP.ORG presents Let's Eat Grandma performing live at
Kex Hostel in Reykjavik during Iceland Airwaves. Recorded November 5, 2016.
It can thickly coarse through the heaviest of heads
leaving you with a sense of pleasure and fulfilment. It’s also often considered
an empty format for the masses to feast upon while the muso-types guffaw at its
simplistic nature, but when all’s said and done, does anything quite push the
boundaries like pop music? Well, after one listen to the new offering from
Let’s Eat Grandma, you’ll be hard-pressed to disagree.
Norfolk-teenagers Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth
really do not abide by any apparent laws of pop, nor music. What they do is
create whatever sounds right to them, utilising the influences appear around
them, amalgamating into a sound that feels impenetrable. And now, with their
second album I’m All Ears they’ve taken things one step further.
In person, the duo are as you’d expect; extensions of
each other, friends that fell into the hands of a beast that could have quite
easily chewed them up and spat them out. But under the hand of nurturing indie
label Transgressive (Bloc Party, Foals, Songhoy Blues), the pair have enchanted
and perplexed, becoming a fast-talking point and subject to the many-a
scrutinous eye and ear for their indefinable sound.
”I think it sounds like we’ve written it in a really
clever way but honestly, I just love pop music. And that’s why I like writing
catchy stuff…nothing else to it really…” Hollingworth tell me, matter-of-factly
with a wry smile on her face. The allusion of an apparent grander idea means
you feel like you need to unpack Let’s Eat Grandma when the real truth is
there’s not much more to it than two minds who are unsullied by anything
outside of their two persons.
On their debut, 2016’s I, Gemini, the duo allowed us
spectators into said warped world of pulsating, moving and obtuse noises. Never
truly revealing what’s what, and leaving us all guessing, perfectly
orchestrating their story, intentional or not, they had, and still have, us
hooked. If you ever caught them live around this time you’d be witness to a
constant flow of instruments changing hands, ideas bouncing and it feels
utterly organic - which is quite possibly the best term to describe Let’s Eat
Grandma.
They’re an amalgamation of the lives they’ve lived,
both together, and apart, never forfeiting any idea of insincerity - which is
where chapter two of their story comes into play. Offering new insight into
their wicked little world, while simultaneously giving us even more to
contemplate. I’m All Ears - where even the title itself feels like a game
that’s being played against us listeners - ebbs and flows with the tide. Even
similarly in the fashion of day to night, it changes to fit the landscape and
breaks away as fast it appears.
From the dark and brooding thunderous sounds of
"Hot Pink" to the airy assuredness of "It’s Not Just Me"
and "Falling Into Me", the three-headed pop-attack at the beginning
of the album signals a change in world. One that, on the surface, appears to be
finally letting us further in but it’s all taken away as the album progresses,
or as Walton puts it, smiling, “It’s like starting with the pop songs and then
going out into space.”
Taking inspiration from all walks of life, films
(Donnie Darko) to imagery and dreams; “I’m really into making mood boards”
Hollingworth reveals with a shy laugh. “Just for fun…” While Walton touches
upon a more psychological influence; “…and I guess, conversations that we have
with people, our friends…”
If there’s one thing you should know about the pair,
it’s that they’re incredibly switched on. Often people jump to refute the
intellect of younger artists on the basis of them simply not having lived
enough, but both Walton and Hollingworth can see far beyond the plain of
'normal' life. They take what they need, and have a way of making the rest fall
into place for them.
"I feel like everyone we meet finds us really
confusing and hard…[like] 'how did they work it out, how did they come up
with…what?!’ And to me, it just makes total sense.” Hollingworth says with a
bright look of disbelief.
Having to explain themselves comes with the territory
of being, dare we say, different. But the fact that I’m All Ears touches upon a
more blatant use of pop means the confusion from has turned those looking
through the magnifying glass to regroup and ask more questions.
"Doing interviews is something that takes a while
to get used to,” Hollingworth offers on the far-from-exotic side of being a
blossoming band.", "and even though I love performing, I wouldn’t say
I was the most outgoing in the sense that I really like being on a public
platform with what I say. It can be pressure, and it can be quite tiring to
make sure you're saying the right things over a lot of interviews.”
Walton continues. “Sometimes people read things, and
they take it really seriously what you’ve said, but sometimes I just chat
bullshit,” She says through a peal of laughter. “And it doesn’t really make
sense, and I know that, and it should be taken with a pinch of salt, but when
you’re in an interview, you’re quoted, [and] it’s not taken with a pinch of
salt!”
“I think I prefer spoken interviews because you can
get more into subjects because it follows more of a conversation, but it’s also
really hard to control what you’ve said. In a conversation you just naturally
come out with bullshit a lot of the time, and then people write it up, and
you’re like, ‘I said that?! Like what?'"
"It’s…” Hollingworth starts before withdrawing
slightly. “...I don’t mind people getting to know us through our music, rather
than necessarily through what we say…" Walton swiftly agrees, giggling.
“Because that’s the best way to do it because it’s like exactly what we’ve
chosen to put across.”
"People are like, 'are you worried you’re going
to be influenced by other people', but I just don’t really care. I just
genuinely don’t give a shit!” giggles Hollingworth. “Do you know what I mean?”
She looks to Walton again for confirmation: "At the end of the day music
matters to me, but people in my life matter more. It’s probably; people I care
about, then music, and then wider people’s opinions.”
Since signing and releasing I, Gemini, their world has
incorporated a lot more focus on areas that may lay waste to the creativity
that flows so smoothly through them, most notably to Hollingworth, social
media.
"I hate it! Honestly, I literally hate it,"
she says suddenly becoming animated. “I hate reading the posts, they stress me
out, like, have you picked the right emoji? It doesn’t actually matter! some
things you do have to let go of, because at the end of the day they don’t
really matter that much.”
It should come as no surprise that even with the help
and confidence of their label, the pair can struggle to keep the atmosphere of
their world alive when it comes to having the necessary support of others,
something Hollingworth earnestly admits: "There can already be so much
pressure, even when you just go to a shoot and people try and get you to do
certain things, and in a certain way. They try and get you to wear certain
clothes. It’s already so much hard work to try and do stuff like that, and get
your artistic vision across.”
"I think the one thing is, when you’ve got a lot
of work to do, like, you’ve got shows to plan, you’ve got artists to work with,
and you’ve got photo shoots and more music to write, I think it can be
overwhelming to make sure that you have control over everything…”
Walton interjects “…especially when we’re
perfectionists, and we’re trying to do everything to the highest level
possible.”
An entirely understandable point given that the more
overt and complex the music may seem, the broader vision can be just as fragile
andn require tending to as much as the core focus. Luckily for the duo, they
still have one place they can return to when they need to step out of the
searing pressures of the music industry.
Originating from Norwich, and meeting in nursery at
the tender age of four, their world has pretty much always constituted of each
other. Still living at home, they duo are able to leave behind the incongruous
(to them) fast-paced London and music industry. While Norwich, to most, is a
familiar name, both Let’s Eat Grandma, and this writer, have experienced the
real feeling of both isolation and opportunity that the city brings.
"I always feel solidarity with people are from
Norwich, or anywhere near because I feel like…you talk about it, and loads of
people never go…it’s never on the way to anywhere…” Hollingworth says.
There’s an argument to be made that the Let’s Eat
Grandma we know and love could’ve been sullied had they been from any city that
offered any semblance of connection to the industry they now inhabit.
"There’s kind of space to do your own thing, and
create things, and mess about because in London there’s so much competition and
such a high energy and drive for everything. You feel like artists don’t get as
much space to do shows where everything isn’t perfect, and in Norwich."
Cutting their teeth in a city that feels in a league
of its own, where, for its size, you can as easily find yourself in at House
rave or a death-metal gig in the same evening, offered up itself an opportunity
for development. Hollingworth recalls. “I think we’ve played gigs that weren’t
good at the beginning and just like played gigs…”
Walton cuts in laughing. “…So many gigs! We’d have like
three people in the audience, and they wouldn’t be listening.”
"It’s funny though because [when] we played there
last time we sold out the Arts Centre, which is quite a big venue for us. I
love playing in Norwich so much actually!”
The ability for them to fall back into a normal life,
with their friends who are still studying and unfamiliar with the idea of press
days and tour life can only be a positive for Walton and Hollingworth. Leaving
the purity of what they first appeared with intact, they’re building upon the
flourishing creativity and awareness into their own untouchable story. Though,
being so complex on the outside, and thrust into a world where numerous
articles and reviews try and pick it apart, evolving to the next stage can
present a new set of problems.
"Our image has evolved quite a lot since we did
our first album” Hollingworth states “And I think people are often like trying
to continue giving us our ‘witchy’ labels from the first album, but because the
music has changed so much, it doesn’t make sense with what we make any more.”
Even looking further toward the future, Walton perks
up. “We wouldn’t want people to be calling it whatever they’re calling this
record!”
What it should come down to for all onlookers is the
fact Walton and Hollingworth are currently making brooding pop that abides by
its own rules - and that could all change in the future. Even the interlude
tracks, "Missed Call" and "The Cat’s Pyjamas" - which features
the resident studio cat called Adam (“He was quite an important part of our
time there”) - are made to throw you off.
Songs that are suited to the trials and tribulations
of growing up remind you that both Walton and Hollingworth aren’t celestial
creatures born out of their love of music and each other, as much as they may
seem it - they are still growing.
The maturity that’s saturated across I'm All Ears'
wandering landscape tracks are real journeys, where the true essence of the
record lies. Not your run of the mill chord-chopping and changing, but actual,
bonafide, talent. "Cool and Collected" is a meandering walk around
jealousy and the want to be somebody else, culminating in a crescendo of an
echoing, starlight summoning guitar solo. With Let’s Eat Grandma, while it may
not always be immediately apparent, there’s always a resolution, be it one you
want or not.
“I think we wanted to experiment with structuring in a
more conventional way because that was something that we didn’t really know how
to do before, and we wanted to try…” Walton explains.
“I think it’s funny because even though we’ve used
more structure conventionally," adds Hollingworth," on a song like
'Falling Into Me', the chord sequences change about six times throughout the
entire song, so if you didn’t think about it, you’d think it’s a pop song, but
actually…we wanted it to still be like just a nice little journey for whoever
is listening.”
And that’s all a part of their newfound grander
scheme: "We want our music to go further. That gives you more
opportunities to travel and do new exciting things. Obviously, we want to be
able to afford to like have our own place to live…just like anybody! We try not
to worry about it; we have good people around us that are trying to make sure
we can live!” Or, more succinctly, as Walton says laughing, “A sustainable
career!”
More importantly, however, no matter the journey Let’s
Eat Grandma go on, no matter the responsibilities that come; the questions, the
spotlights, one thing’s for sure according to Walton. “I definitely don’t think
it’d have had any negative effect on our friendship because even though we are
Let’s Eat Grandma, we also are just Walton and Hollingworth.”
Let's Eat Grandma deconstruct their everchanging pop
experimentalism with Steven Loftin. By Steven Loftin. The Line of Best Fit , June 26, 2018.
Review of their second album I'm All Ears. By Meaghan Garvey. Pitchfork
, July 3 2018
In Let’s Eat Grandma’s vision of utopia, some days you
might look like an alien; others, you wake up invisible. In a recent interview,
the British duo—Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton, both 19 and friends since
kindergarten—wrestled with the limits of gender as identity. Life would make
more sense, they suggested, if physical appearances warped constantly to
represent one’s inner self. Rather than be a body, said Walton, “I wanna be a
concept.” If you’ve existed as a teenager, you can probably relate; now imagine
releasing an album of self-described “experimental sludge pop” as a pair of
16-year-olds dressed like haunted twin dolls. The response was predictable:
adult critics shocked that teenage girls could make music at all, let alone
music this trippy.
That resistance to easy interpretation extends all the
way to the name itself—which, granted, doesn’t exactly gesture towards
virtuosity on first glance. “It’s a punctuation joke,” Hollingworth
explained—an Eats, Shoots & Leaves type deal where one misplaced comma
turns a dinner invite (“Let’s eat, Grandma!”) into a horror movie. But beyond
an inside joke, the shape-shifting name embodies LEG’s creative ethos, slyly
expanding on conventional notions of how music made by girls “should” sound.
Their second album takes matters a step further. I’m All Ears doesn’t just defy
demographic stereotypes—it sounds like nothing else in pop right now.
I, Gemini, the duo’s 2016 debut, felt childlike in the
sense that it was quite literally written by children; back then, Walton and
Hollingworth’s helium-pitch voices gave the impression of cartoon mice, even as
they sang about dead cats and radioactive mushrooms. Mileage may have varied
depending on one’s tolerance for freak-folk or dadaist poetry, but clearly this
wasn’t amateur hour. Guiding LEG’s voracious instrumental experiments
(glockenspiels, recorders, motherfucking KAZOOS) was a sense of total control.
If anything, I, Gemini’s everything-at-once psychedelia spoke directly to the
feeling of being a young teenager—a kaleidoscope of unknowns, as terrifying as
it is cool.
Two years later, I’m All Ears delivers on its
predecessor’s promise, and though its songs are coated with newfound gloss,
they’re just as much of a trip. That much was clear from the first single, “Hot
Pink”—a sighing, snarling pop banger, co-produced by SOPHIE alongside the
Horrors’ Faris Badwan, that weaponizes the femininity that’s been leveled
against the duo. “I’m just an object of disdain to you,” they sing jointly,
their voices sickly sweet. “I’m only 17, I don’t know what you mean.” For a
SOPHIE production, it’s relatively subdued, until the chorus shatters into
sounds of breaking glass and failing machinery as the duo’s delivery bristles.
“HOT PINK! Is it mine, is it?” they yelp, flipping the hue of drug-store
lipstick and Barbie convertibles into a battle cry. The coexistence of hard and
soft isn’t a study in contrasts but in synthesis, merging the two modes until
you can’t tell where hard ends and soft begins.
That song’s final chorus is
interrupted by a phone call, the first of many moments on I’m All Ears where
technology casts an uncanny glow. Pizzicato strings re-imagine a ringtone on
the “Missed Call (1)” interlude, and “It’s Not Just Me”—a gently glitched-out
synth-pop number, and the album’s second SOPHIE/Badwan production—includes a
profoundly Gen Z farewell: “I don’t wanna say goodbye/I guess I’ll see you when
the screen is vibrating.” Translating our virtual lives into compelling art is
a challenge that often leaves me cold; how do you convey the humanity of a
conversation carried out in text bubbles without sounding corny? But I’m All
Ears renders flattened communication as poignant, striking not because of the
novelty of being made by teenagers but because it speaks with such commanding precision to
the experience of a teenager in 2018. In that sense, the album’s pop synthetics
aren’t such a drastic departure from LEG’s previous work; they heighten the
surreal feeling of paradigm-shifting emotional experiences that transpire on a
screen in your hand.
But despite the boldness of the production—uninhibited
but never excessive, veering from Goblin-esque prog to pristine dance-pop to
sludgy psych, sometimes in the same track—the album’s most mind-bending moments
happen in Walton and Hollingworth’s writing. “Falling Into Me,” an ecstatic,
street-lit roller-disco epic, opens with some of the most evocative lyrics I’ve
heard all year: “I paved the backstreets with the mist of my brain/I crossed
the gap between the platform and train.” (Amid all the headiness, three simple
words later in the chorus—“You/Me/This”—are just as effective in describing the
headrush of new romance.) And over the sullen guitar chords of “Cool &
Collected,” LEG articulate the anxiety of feeling like a charmless nerd in
front of your crush better than I’ve ever heard: “I still blur in the haze that
you cut straight through.”
Rather than get lost in these insecurities, LEG uses
them as fuel, embracing uncertainty as a psychedelic experience in its own
right. And where “Cool & Collected” wallows, album closer “Donnie Darko”
practically levitates. Listless midsummer psych-pop climaxes into strobing,
cerebral ’80s disco for the home stretch of the 11-plus minute suite; we are
left with Walton and Hollingworth lying on the tile of their bathroom floor,
heads spinning, drunk with emotion. I imagine the scene illuminated just like
the video for “Hot Pink,” where phone screens and secret rooms beam with an
irresistible glow, feminine and sinister and ultimately unresolved—the girls
disappear into a bright pink room, and that’s the last we see.
All of this reminds me that before it became known as
the official shade of prescribed femininity, hot pink meant provocation.
“Shocking pink” was introduced to the fashion world in the 1930s as the
signature color of surrealist designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who collaborated with
Salvador Dalí and, as a child, buried flower seeds in her nose and ears in an
attempt to grow a garden on her face. Her designs were as weird as they were
womanly, and shocking pink was no exception: “Bright, impossible, impudent becoming,
life-giving,” she once lovingly described it. You could say the same thing of
Let’s Eat Grandma, whose bold, tender music at once captures teenage girlhood
and transcends it entirely. I can’t imagine what they’ll do next.
Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton first bonded over a
turquoise and orange snail. The pair were drawing at a table in their
kindergarten class, where Hollingworth was working hard on her technicolor
creature. Impressed, Walton peered over and said, “Hi, do you want to be my
friend?” Recalling this story, the teenagers of Let’s Eat Grandma share a
private look. “Rosa’s always admired my art,” Hollingworth adds, with a
pseudo-modest flourish of the wrist. A moment passes before the pair explode
into laughter. “From the beginning,” Walton earnestly concurs, “Jenny’s been a
creative genius.”
It’s a February afternoon in Norwich, a cozy city in
the east of England, and Let’s Eat Grandma are unfurling their origin story in
the upstairs enclosure of a local vegan café. Hollingworth, who began the
conversation cocooned away in a puffy green jacket, quickly becomes the focal
point, holding forth on such topics as celebrity feminism and online
clique-forming, as Walton gazes out the window. This rhythm persists until,
quizzed on a knotty chapter of band history, the pair will perk up and
synchronize, primed to elaborate and clarify in wide-eyed bursts.
These childhood friends have a firm clasp on their
sprawling pop band’s narrative, from their early days plotting local shows at
age 13 through the release, three years later, of an original and darkly
alluring debut album called I, Gemini. By turns solemn and playful, that record
stitched together screams, kazoos, and incantatory monologues, as if an unruly
teen-girl squad had been stranded, Lord of the Flies-style, in a remote music
class, then self-organized and declared sovereignty.
But I, Gemini was written four years ago—an eon in
teenage time. They’re now 18 and 19, and their forthcoming second LP, I’m All
Ears, is a staggering reinvention. The new record’s most radical departure is
the recent single “Hot Pink,” written and recorded with experimental pop
producer SOPHIE as well as Faris Badwan of the shadowy indie-pop group the
Horrors. But the whole thing is full of hairpin turns, veering from the pop
intricacies of Lorde and the xx to sweeping prog, sometimes within the same
eight-minute-plus song. It marks an extraordinary progression, especially
coming from Norwich’s unassuming music scene.
After finding common ground in kindergarten, the young
friends grew up in tandem, often in worlds of their own invention. When they
were 10, they composed a jazz-funk song about the travails of epic boredom,
using percussion their parents had picked up while travelling the world:
maracas, bells, a rain stick. At 13, they set up a rehearsal room in Walton’s
loft, where they wrote songs on a new guitar bought for her birthday. “Every
time my parents had someone stay, we had to move the drum kit,” Walton says,
chuckling. Within a year, they were booking their own gigs around Norwich.
Following Walton’s gaze out the window, you can see the
block that houses Access Norwich, a creative center where the duo studied after
leaving high school at 16. The school offers music-themed classes in
composition, history, and business to people outside the traditional education
system. (Alums include Ed Sheeran.) It’s a valuable service in Norwich, which
attracts the anachronistic and bookish; until recently, this modestly populated
city had the UK’s most frequented library. The region is somewhat remote,
tucked in an eastern crevice hours off the motorways—“not somewhere you can end
up by accident,” goes a local cliché. Anyone left out of its small,
self-contained scenes tends to gravitate toward London, a two-hour train away.
But Access Norwich corrals those who haven’t yet escaped, and fosters an
informal network through which more artists might grow local roots.
With their leftfield aesthetic and weird accessibility,
Let’s Eat Grandma are exemplars of this oddball community, which is not to say
they belong here. “We’ve never felt like we fit into any particular
subculture,” Hollingworth concedes, with a trace of pride. As a child, she
would attend soldering and amateur-radio clubs at her electrical engineer dad’s
behest; in school, she made prize-winning animated films using Playmobil
models. Her mother is an aspiring novelist and sometime teacher, the kind who
derides the education system. Hollingworth, lamenting everything from
mainstream music schooling to social media and dating, appears to have
inherited some of her mom’s skepticism.
Walton had a similarly particular upbringing. A longtime
hobby of her ornithologist father’s is to capture live moths overnight using a
bright light and a hidden box, then keep them in the family fridge. “It
basically pauses their lives, so it’s not actually cruel,” she explains. “He
identifies them and lets them go, and they can get on with their day.” Outside
her job as a substitute teacher, Walton’s mom can be found cruising around town
blasting Frank Ocean from their silver Fiat 500.
By the time they were 16, Let’s Eat Grandma had won fans
throughout England with their witchlike theatrics, playground handclap
routines, and a proclivity for lying down onstage. With I, Gemini, they
channeled their unhinged curiosity into a musical wonderland; despite its
inspired turns, though, a few skeptics found the fabulist oddity hard to love.
I’m All Ears, a communion of plainspoken observation and measured honesty, is
unlikely to meet similar criticism.
Walton had a similarly particular upbringing. A longtime
hobby of her ornithologist father’s is to capture live moths overnight using a
bright light and a hidden box, then keep them in the family fridge. “It
basically pauses their lives, so it’s not actually cruel,” she explains. “He
identifies them and lets them go, and they can get on with their day.” Outside
her job as a substitute teacher, Walton’s mom can be found cruising around town
blasting Frank Ocean from their silver Fiat 500.
By the time they were 16, Let’s Eat Grandma had won fans
throughout England with their witchlike theatrics, playground handclap
routines, and a proclivity for lying down onstage. With I, Gemini, they
channeled their unhinged curiosity into a musical wonderland; despite its
inspired turns, though, a few skeptics found the fabulist oddity hard to love.
I’m All Ears, a communion of plainspoken observation and measured honesty, is
unlikely to meet similar criticism.
“Often we talk about a topic that we have different
perspectives on, and then the song ends up being both at once,” Hollingworth
explains of their process, singling out new track “It’s Not Just Me.” There,
the pair alternate verses about a nebulous relationship, address the romantic
interest in a pleading bridge, then chorus over chopped vocals and euphoric
synth. Its central mantra—“It’s not just me/I know you’re feeling the same
way”—seems at once to celebrate a mutual romance and the relief of confiding in
loved ones. It’s an effervescent highlight on an album perfectly attuned to the
conflicting signals and makeshift bonds that make up young adulthood.
Pitchfork: The new record is a giant departure from the
last one. How do you feel about your first album now?
Rosa Walton: I went back to it the other day after not
having listened to it for 100 years, and it definitely feels nostalgic of that
time. It’s interesting hearing our voices and how high they are, how we
literally sound like mice.
Jenny Hollingworth: The thing that makes me laugh is when
people write an article about us, and they’ll be like, “Are you putting on your
voices?” I’m like, “I wish, mate.” I find it amusing when people were thinking
it’s engineered, because they don’t understand young people making music.
So when people say the album was childlike, does that
feel on some level true?
RW: It frustrates us when people say we’re childlike now,
because that’s not a reflection of us. But of course it was childlike, because
it was written by two kids. Young teenagers don’t often get the chance to
release music, so people don’t realize how it sounds.
JH: People can be a bit patronizing...
RW: … towards young people in general.
Do you expect anything to change this time around?
RW: When we started out, people didn’t take us seriously
at all.
JH: Which we can understand, because some of the shows
were really bad. But when you’re a young female artist and you do something
that’s a bit shit, people are so quick to be assholes about it. You’re either
gonna be shot down or, when you do really well, people are gonna obsess over
the fact that you’re young and female. I feel like people just don’t understand
young girls at all. Like, “Wow! An album written by a young girl!” I’m like:
[makes thinking emoji face]. I feel bad even being annoyed about it, because
there’s so many great opportunities we’ve had. But it was
a bit annoying.
In visual terms, you’ve come back with more defined
personal images this time out.
RW: We want to express our individual selves a bit more,
instead of being tied together. As we’ve grown up, we’ve grown apart—not in closeness,
but in that we’ve developed different interests.
JH: When you’re more confident in yourself, you can be
yourself more, rather than attaching to someone else.
What are some individual interests you’ve developed?
JH: I’m quite interested in aspects of internet culture.
Which is funny, because I actually have hardly any social media. I’m quite
anonymous. I spend a lot of time looking at how different groups of people
interact online.
RW: I’m learning a lot about music production and
synthesis. I recently read 1984 for the first time.
JH: I’m also quite into horror manga. I’m reading one
about being obsessed with collecting spirals.
You worked with SOPHIE on two tracks on this album. What
is it about her music that appealed to you?
JH: We’ve always been into SOPHIE’s music, even before
our last record came out. She was so mysterious. You wouldn’t expect that
something so poppy could have such an emotional effect on you. We went to see
her recently, and even though she’s well-known, it felt like everyone was in on
a secret.
In “Hot Pink,” you start by calling out a belittling
antagonist—what, or who, did you have in mind writing that?
RW: It isn’t really about a specific person. It’s about a
certain feeling that we, and a lot of people, feel.
JH: Part of it is about how I generally have a bit of a
beef with dating, because I feel like I can’t get the mutual respect that I
want. So I just don’t bother.
The song’s chorus pivots completely. There’s some
surrealist imagery and this phrase: “hot pink.”
RW: It’s about how people should be able to be feminine,
and all the various stereotypes that comes with gender.
JH: I’m not really a fan of feminism where it’s just an
actress making £10 million. It’s not meant to be a story of us complaining.
RW: It’s not meant to be just empowering for girls; it’s
meant to be empowering for everyone.
Looking ahead, are you planning to go to college?
JH: Oh... yeah, um...
RW: I don’t have any plans to go in the near future.
JH: It’s weird. A lot of our friends are at university,
and it feels like what people our age should be doing.
RW: But there’s a lot of other ways to learn things than
just going to university. Just because it’s the path that a lot of people take,
it doesn’t mean it’s the one you have to follow.
Let’s Eat Grandma Are the Wonderfully Weird Pop Duo We
Need Right Now. by Jazz Monroe.
Pitchfork. March 22 2018
KEXP.ORG presents Let's Eat Grandma performing live in
the KEXP studio. Recorded August 29, 2018.
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