Alone, Together

Let’s Eat Grandma’s Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton on learning how to write their stories separately after a lifelong friendship.

- By Justin Curto. Illustration by Mark Harris

The 23-year-old synth-pop musicians Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton have been best friends since they first bonded overdrawing at age 4. That kinship established their tight collaboration as a two-person band named for a grammar gag (note the missing comma). The duo from Norwich, England, arrived just as an emotional streak hit synth-pop (prompted by albums like Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion and Chairlift’s Moth). Their ability to infuse mischief into songs without undercutting poignancy stood out. Let’s Eat Grandma’s sound remained distinct even as they branched off to outside producers including the late sophie. Their upcoming third album, Two Ribbons, is foreign territory: their first written separately. Hollingworth spent much of 2019 grieving her boyfriend, the musician Billy Clayton, who died from cancer that March; simultaneously, Walton was discovering her bisexuality and dating women. For the first time, they had experiences to which the other couldn’t relate.

Do you recall when music entered the mix of your friendship?

ROSA WALTON: Quite a lot later on. We wrote joke songs when we were 10 for fun and would make spy movies and attempt to make sweets and dye our clothes with beetroot—things that kids do.

JENNY HOLLINGWORTH: We were really quite atrocious at first.

R.W.: We’ve become slicker as a band. It’s important to retain that initial freedom and creativity that we had back when we weren’t trying to make an album. We were just writing for ourselves.