As one half of Let’s Eat Grandma, Jenny Hollingworth made music that got under the skin. Two prodigious sixth-formers from Norwich, she and Rosa Walton – best friends since they were four – wrote teenage odysseys that were bold, lurid and inventive. Admired for their unguarded vocals and impressionistic lyrics, the duo broke through in 2018 with I’m All Ears, a second album that translated weirdness into proper synthpop: a collision of rave-y euphoria, harsh electronics and playful snatches of recorder and violin. It earned them an Ivor Novello nomination.
By the time they released follow-up Two Ribbons in 2022, still just 23 years old, they were hailed as generational talents. That album was a masterpiece about grief and the changing nature of friendship, but it nearly broke Hollingworth. Now she’s releasing her buoyant debut solo record, Quicksand Heart, under the moniker Jenny on Holiday.
“I just wanted to have more fun making music again, and not be trying to sum up really traumatic parts of my life,” Hollingworth, 27, tells me. In 2019, on the eve of a US tour to promote I’m All Ears, her boyfriend Billy Clayton died of bone cancer, aged 22. “Things don’t really hit you for a while. I think sometimes it’s actually later on that you can struggle more.” Having recovered from the years of wrestling “really deeply with life problems and loss”, she feels that “it’s made me more determined to make music and live fully”.
We’re in her label’s office in north London. Funny and self-effacing, Hollingworth is prone to tangents, ideas arriving in kaleidoscopic bursts rather than straight lines. She sometimes covers her mouth mid-sentence, as if surprised by her own thoughts. As she settles in, she becomes more sardonic, looser, rocking back and forth in her seat as the jokes land. We bond over having Invisalign teeth straighteners; she gets hers off this month.
A determination to find joy radiates through Quicksand Heart. Its big pop songs glisten with a lacquered Eighties sheen: maximalist and exuberant, filigrees of strings and piano threading through gleaming synthesisers. On the wonderful “Dolphins”, Hollingworth even samples guitar into synth sounds to mimic dolphin noises. “My parents being boomers probably drilled all those Eighties synths into my head,” she notes.
Listen carefully and you’ll hear echoes of Prefab Sprout, Cyndi Lauper and Tina Turner. Lyrically, she’s drawn to the “heartfelt storytelling” of The Replacements. “The songs always come from a feeling, and the feeling gets overwhelming,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Bloody hell, I’m going to have to write another pop song.’”
Hollingworth has always been, by her own admission, “a very sensitive and emotionally intense person” – something she’s viewed as a weakness or a defect. The new songs reflect that. The title track references The Wizard of Oz, and its characters’ famous missing organs: “I’ve got a heart made of quicksand, I’ve got bones made of f***ed-up straw,” she sings. It becomes a love song about accepting yourself as you are. “The tracks are quite intense and emotionally heartfelt, but that’s what’s most genuine to me,” she explains.
But self-acceptance didn’t come easily. The veneration that met Two Ribbons didn’t breed confidence. “I honestly don’t really know why,” she wonders. “I think maybe just because of all the stuff that happened, how intense all of it was.” She still struggles with low self-esteem.
Making Quicksand Heart alone meant confronting that head-on. “There were parts where I’d be like, to Rosa, ‘I’m having a mental breakdown,’” says Hollingworth. But she’s come to see that inner turmoil as essential to the process. “I feel like that’s part of writing. You have to go through bad patches where you’re really freaked out by doing something. Otherwise I don’t think you’re challenging yourself.”
Eventually, though, the dam broke. She wrote nearly the whole record in 2024, holed up at her parents’ house. Then the demos went to Walton, who appears on several tracks – “Dolphins”, “Good Intentions”, “Appetite” – as backing vocalist. The album cover, shot by photographer Steve Gullick, shows Hollingworth in her mother’s wedding dress; her mum married at the same age Hollingworth is now. “My marriage is to my album, my music career,” the singer laughs.
Hollingworth cuts a striking figure in that shot, with her thick dark fringe and otherworldly presence. Comparisons to Kate Bush are inevitable. “I would never be offended by that, because I think she’s amazing,” she says. She wasn’t au fait with Bush’s music during the witchy aesthetic of Let’s Eat Grandma’s debut album I, Gemini – “Me and Rosa used to just listen to NOW! CDs” – but these days she relates to the baroque-pop godmother’s outlook. “I feel like she seems to see things in an abstract way.”
For Quicksand Heart, Hollingworth teamed up with producer Steph Marziano. They became close: Hollingworth ended up in Marziano’s ice cream WhatsApp group, where musicians review ice cream on a Pitchfork scale. One day, she got a message inviting her to get ice cream in London. “I was like, ‘I’m in town with Rosa. We’ll come hang out, Steph,’” she recalls. “And I get there, and Hayley Williams [of Paramore] is just there. Obviously, Steph had worked on [two of] Hayley’s solo records [2021’s Petals for Armor and 2025’s Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party]. I was like, ‘I might have to have a normal conversation’, but yeah, I am a big fan of hers.”
‘Two Ribbons’ was so emotionally vulnerable that every time I went to perform it, it would take me back to those emotions
There’s a vein of feminine rage running through these songs, though Hollingworth seems almost surprised when I mention it. “You know, that’s so interesting,” she says. Growing up, she spent too much time “feeling bad about wanting anything or expressing desire for things”. Some of that, she thinks, came from relationships with men in her life – though she’s quick to add that a lot of it is internalised. “Me actually taking up space and saying, no, I really want to make my records,” she says.
It’s there in the swaggering “Appetite” – “Is it so wrong to want? Is it so bad to take what’s yours?” she demands over jangling guitars.
Inspired by Hole’s rumbustious 1994 classic Live Through This, she was writing about appetite in its broadest sense. “Desire for power, success, sex, and also just food,” she explains. “I guess maybe I was like, ‘Oh actually I do have quite an appetite for things in my life.’” That anger is there, too, in the synth banger “Every Ounce of Me”, where the title refrain rises above searing guitar. “It’s about being unable to help falling for someone despite your reservations about love and the feeling of being overcome by that person,” Hollingworth says.
It’s been hard, in some ways, to return to the process. After Clayton’s death in 2019, the tour to promote I’m All Ears almost flew off the rails. At Coachella, Hollingworth was barely able to register the duo’s performance through the numbness. By the time the Two Ribbons tour came around in 2022, the stage fright had intensified – dry-retching before shows, anxiety that sometimes persisted even while she was performing.
“The album was so emotionally vulnerable that every time I went to perform it, it would take me back to those emotions,” she says. Before each show, she needed time alone with her headphones. What did she listen to? “Oh my God, ‘Fight Song’,” she jokes, referring to Rachel Platten’s 2015 empowerment anthem. The anxiety has improved since, though she thinks you can still see traces of it in recent performances. “You just kind of have to get through it,” she adds.
The question of Let’s Eat Grandma’s future hovers over all of this, but Hollingworth is unequivocal: the band isn’t over. She describes their dynamic as mutually supportive, with neither of them wanting to outpace the other. “We want to be running the race together.” Walton still pulls her forward, she says: “I think we both challenge each other and encourage each other to be better.”
The solo projects aren’t a symptom of strain but a way to avoid creative rut, to bring fresh ideas back to the band. “Our friendship is always going to take priority,” says Hollingworth, who is staying at Walton’s flat in east London after this interview. “We’re like siblings. There’s never going to be a point in our lives where we’re not really close.”
Jenny on Holiday’s ‘Quicksand Heart’ is out today through Transgressive Records. She is currently on her UK in-store tour
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