Let’s Eat Grandma spent part of the fall of 2019 in a series of seaside Airbnbs on the coast of Norwich, England. The town was so small it was impossible to find a shop that sold bath towels, so the duo had to share the same dish towel they used to dry the dishes for five days. It was here that Rosa Walton’s bandmate and best friend Jenny Hollingworth played the song that could have ended their group.
Walton had written the song a year earlier, when the two were preparing to tour England as the buzzing, psychedelic British electro-pop band Let’s Eat Grandma. (The name is a grammar joke ripped from the punctuation book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” a wink with just a hint of horror.) Their second album, “I’m All Ears,” had just brought a new level of acclaim back home. and in the United States, and a slot at Coachella. But in their day-to-day interactions, Hollingworth and Walton were thrashing and thrashing.
“Eventually you act even weirder because you try so hard to act normal,” Walton said. On “Two Ribbons”, their new album out on April 29, they confront the distance between them with painful acuity, over a soundtrack of kaleidoscopic synths and gleaming pop beats.
Hollingworth and Walton are not just band members; they’ve been inseparable since kindergarten, when Walton walked up to Hollingworth, who drew an orange snail, and asked, “Will you be my friend?” When they were 13, they performed as a band and booked gigs in Norwich. Their 2016 debut, “I, Gemini,” was a frenetic album of distorted, jittery pop with song titles like “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms” and “Chocolate Sludge Cake.” Their voices were so innocently childish that people asked them if they had raised their voices. In music videos, they style themselves as twins, with waterfalls of tousled hair and matching white dresses.
But during tour rehearsals for their second album, the duo was suddenly so used to fading into each other and communicating with an ease and intensity that bordered on telepathy and unable to finish each other’s sentences.
Over the course of the thrilling tour for “I’m All Ears,” Walton pieced together the verses for “Insect Loop,” the raw song she thought could completely threaten their band. “You never noticed”, she sings on the song over the powerful guitar strumming that breaks between mournful riffs. “Dip my head in the tub and scream underwater / ‘Cause maybe I thought you didn’t care.”
This is the watered-down version, Walton, 22, and Hollingworth, 23, said in a recent video call. Walton sat in a chair in her record label’s London office, while Hollingworth, who had signed up with the name ‘cool dog’, sat in her Norwich bedroom, where neon posters supplied with a My Bloody Valentine album were displayed on the floor. fluorescent purple walls. During the hour-and-a-half discussion, they giggled as they talked over each other, gesturing with frenzied hands for the other to speak first. They began to grow distant, they explained, as they adjusted to the anxieties of their nascent niche fame, growing out of the routines that anchored their friendship in the early years.
It wasn’t a decision, they said, to start writing about the rift that was growing between them — the songs trickled out. That didn’t make it any easier to share.
When Hollingworth first heard “Insect Loop,” she was shocked at how angry it sounded, the anger writhing in every verse. “Rosa was just expressing herself, because I’m sure there were things I did back then that were hurtful,” Hollingworth said, the light from a nearby window spilling over the brash line of her bangs. “It’s all a mess really,” she added with a laugh. “And that’s just one song.”
Rather than a dramatic reconciliation, she and Walton cemented their friendship in real time as they made the record. “The writing process, the recording process, was all about breaking those gaps gradually,” Hollingworth said. “We had to constantly confront those feelings through the songs.”
Walton and Hollingworth tried to build time to decompress and mend their relationship. In the evenings in the Airbnbs they made pesto pasta and watched “Euphoria”; during the day they sat by the waves and tinkered with the bridge of “Insect Loop”. For the first time in their careers, they gave themselves the space to write separately. Every time one of them played a song to the other, they ended up talking about the underlying fear and anxiety.
In addition to the distance between them, there were other serious problems. “We’re getting old,” Walton said of the group’s forced rapid maturation. In March 2019, Hollingworth’s boyfriend, electronic musician Billy Clayton, died of a rare form of bone cancer. Hollingworth describes the anger and despair of his struggle with treatment on the new song “Watching You Go” – “I’m Not to waste it,” she exclaims over a constellation of synths. Let’s Eat Grandma canceled its US tour dates, except for Coachella, who played it in April of that year as a tribute to Clayton.
At one point during the festival, Hollingworth recalled a young adult book, Patrick Ness’ “A Monster Calls,” in which a 13-year-old boy has recurring nightmares about his mother, who has terminal cancer, and falls off a cliff. † She now has a copy in her bedroom and held it up to the screen. “It’s one of the best books about grief I’ve read,” she said. “It resonated with me, the difficulty of coping with the idea that someone is really going to die. It is difficult to register your emotions. You have this numbness.”
During England’s strict coronavirus lockdown, Hollingworth and Walton walked to a nearby cemetery, partly because they desperately wanted to see nature, but partly to process their grief. In addition to Clayton, in January 2021 they lost Sophie, the transformative producer who taught them to put together glitchy, contortionist doll. “It’s almost too early to see how big her influence will be,” Hollingworth said. “Because we are too close.”
With so much loss and uncertainty in the air, the duo attempted to capture the scene of those cemetery walks for the album, in a wordless, minute-and-a-half-long track called “In the Cemetery” that consists mostly of writhing synths and flutters of birdsong.
That interlude provides the listener with a breather, said David Wrench, who produced the album. The three of them were in a studio in London, intermittently over a period of 18 months; Hollingworth and Walton popped out for lunch and bought Cadbury Creme Eggs, and Wrench cycled through his collection of Timbuktu Records releases to “rinse our ears.” When they listened to early versions of the album, “it was almost too much at one point,” Wrench said during a phone call from his studio. “It’s pretty emotionally intense.”
The cemetery walks took place when Walton and Hollingworth lived five minutes apart in Norwich, after a tense period during which Walton had moved to London. But when lockdown restrictions made it difficult for them to see each other, they resorted to video chats and conversations. The upheaval and disorientation of the pandemic pervades the record. “Levitation” follows a panic attack on a bathroom floor. “Hall of Mirrors” unfolds to jittery beats.
In January, Let’s Eat Grandma played its first shows in years, in London, and were excited and terrified to see audiences know the words to such intimate, boiling numbers. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous in my bloody life,” Hollingworth said. In videos of the performance, the band members jumped across the stage and wrapped their arms around each other. As they play the title track from “Two Ribbons,” Hollingworth grabs the mic with both hands and continues to stare across the stage at Walton, bent over her guitar in the yellow light.
“I just want to be your best friend,” Hollingworth sings, her voice trembling a little. “Just like it always was.”
