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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
