The debut solo album from the indie artist Jenny Hollingworth is a brilliantly bittersweet walk on pop’s melancholy side.
There are glimpses in her dreamy songwriting of Kate Bush, Cyndi Lauper, Tori Amos, Abba and Cocteau Twins – artists who share Hollingworth’s commitment to both catchy tunes and the meticulous chronicling of heartache.
But she balances homage with a keen appreciation of her strengths as an artist – chiefly a talent for high-flying hooks and for material that marries the gentle frenzy of the indie disco with the comforting starkness of a 3am weeping session.
This deeply affecting record is also a reminder of the fundamental rule of pop: nothing goes together quite like downbeat lyrics and upbeat melodies.
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Hollingworth expertly balances pathos and celebration: the single Good Intentions, for instance, pairs a brisk beat with heartbroken wordplay (“I saw the fear in your eyes / And I felt it all, the ache, the tension”). It’s a big, shameless sob of a song that will make you want to grin with happiness.
Although this is Hollingworth’s first stand-alone LP, she has been a figure of note in alternative pop for going on a decade – the name of her Jenny on Holiday project is a play on both her own name and her career arc. She has spent most of her adult life as one-half of the haunting pop duo Let’s Eat Grandma, the intensity of her relationship with Rosa Walton, her childhood friend and bandmate, appearing to have become more burden than blessing over time.
That was one of the themes of Two Ribbons, their critical hit from 2022: they sang about growing further apart as life and its challenges took their toll. They remain friends, and Let’s Eat Grandma have not split – a pleasant surprise considering that the Two Ribbons single Happy New Year was all about them platonically going their separate ways. “Just think, if we’d been together we’d be breaking up,” Hollingworth sang.
She would later talk about how the strain of constant touring made demands on her and Walton that would never be placed on a normal relationship.
Let’s Eat Grandma combined a finely honed pop touch with a spooky streak, although Hollingworth and Walton would later express surprise that audiences found something eerie and uncanny about two teenage girls making music together.
They did, however, admit to dressing alike on purpose. “We used to sit and stare at the audience a lot,” Walton told The Irish Times. “A lot of people interpreted that as creepy. We’d get a lot of comparisons to the twins from The Shining. I don’t think we recognised it as being creepy. We recognised the power of standing and staring at the audience and looking exactly the same.”
Looking the same, but now sounding different. Hollingworth has said that Quicksand Heart represents a fresh beginning. She has been through an awful lot, not just the tensions within Let’s Eat Grandma but also the loss, in 2019, of her boyfriend, who died of cancer at the age of 22.
“I just wanted to have more fun making music again, and not be trying to sum up really traumatic parts of my life,” she told the London Independent. “Things don’t really hit you for a while. I think sometimes it’s actually later on that you can struggle more.”
Grief is, of course, a difficult and complicated subject, and one that’s different for everyone. In the case of her new project, Hollingworth remains a compellingly mournful songwriter. That is due in part to the quality of her singing voice, which vibrates with ennui on the title track, where it soars sadly over grungy guitar.
There’s nothing here as wonderfully deranged as Let’s Eat Grandma classics such as Donnie Darko – during concerts the duo would finish the tune by walking down from the stage and wassailing among the crowd.
In place of that folk-horror disco energy is a keenly honed melodic sensibility: Dolphins is a brittle, blistering ballad, Groundskeeping an excursion into stripped-back folk that gives Hollingworth’s aching vocals space to breathe. The LP closes with another big, bleak break-up moment in Appetite, an almost Springsteenesque song that has guitars swirling around a chugging hook.
Stepping outside Let’s Eat Grandma, Hollingworth has set herself the challenge of doing something different. This wonderful solo record isn’t a radical break with the past, but it is a grippingly gauzy celebration of indie-pop catharsis – and a brilliantly poignant way to kick off the year.
