Using Technology As A Writing Tool & Being Taken More Seriously

"I feel like it's easier to get a sense of who we are through our record than it is through an interview," says Jenny Hollingworth of Let's Eat Grandma. She has a point. Interviewing the English duo, Hollingworth and Rosa Walton, a pair of 19-year-olds from Norwich, feels like impeding on their private world; being privy to, but still outside of, their shared glances, unspoken acknowledgements and finished-by-the-other sentences. Listening to their music, though, is like being invited in, taken on a tour of their minds; Let's Eat Grandma specialising in oddball pop fantasias.

Their debut LP, 2016's I, Gemini was a psychedelic, beautiful, sometimes-proggy pop record; an album that manages to be both accessible and insular. The focus, upon its release, was the age of the two girls who'd made it. "I think a lot of people definitely fixated on the fact that we were young girls. And were quite patronising because of that," Walton says.

With the release of their new LP, I'm All Ears, the duo are hoping that narrative dies. "It's changing, for sure," Walton says. "It's definitely got a little bit better since we've gotten older. Apparently, people take 19-year-olds more seriously than they take 15-year-olds."

The narrative, this time, is that the duo have embraced pop in a purer sense; a couple of particularly glossy cuts collaborations with electronic producer SOPHIE. "This time around, we've gone slightly more down the conventional pop route, though I doubt that conventional is even the right word for it," Walton laughs. "We're trying to take the more experimental elements of our songwriting and incorporate it into a form that's easier to dance to, easier to enjoy. We know when to use the experimental bits a bit more, rather than always using them."

Hollingworth, however, thinks any attribution of it being a sudden change is off base. She grew up on pop ("Soooo much pop music. I've always listened to loads of '80s music, to be honest. Just the hits. Just pop music.") and hears its influence in everything they've done. "[I, Gemini] was actually really inspired by pop music," she says. "A lot of people have written that it was inspired by, like, the Cocteau Twins and Kate Bush, but we never really listened to that when we were younger. We were like a lot of other young teenagers, we listened to pop music. But, because we were discovering songwriting, we wanted to spin pop music on its head and do our own thing with it."

Spinning pop music on its head, this time around, meant working with more electronic elements. "We literally wrote it in a really different way," Walton says. "We've learnt a lot more about how to use technology, recently, so we learnt that as a writing tool as opposed to just playing the instruments physically."

Writing for the duo is, of course, unspoken, the product of their shared minds. The pair met as five-year-olds and have remained friends since. They started writing songs at 13. By this point, it's "all incredibly intuitive", Hollingworth says. "It all just came really naturally. We'll get questions like, 'Did you put this chord change in here to do this?' and we don't have an answer."

A key part of that dynamic is the fact that they each have different musical approaches: Walton has studied music theory, Hollingworth hasn't. "I'm glad that Rosa has [musical training], because I have no idea what's going on," offers Hollingworth. "It's good to have both approaches. Sometimes, you come out with more interesting things when you're not restricted by knowing what the rules are. But, then, it can be useful as well, to know those rules," Walton adds.

The duo "wouldn't change anything" about I'm All Ears, Hollingworth thinking it "perfectly sums up [the] period of time" in which it was made, just as I, Gemini captured a distant time. "I think it's really nice to have different records that capture different times of your life," says Walton. "And we're gonna enjoy looking back on that in the future. Already if I listen back to the first record now, I definitely feel very nostalgic for that time."