The intense closeness of
Let's Eat Grandma's Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth has always been a major part of their story and their music. They immediately became best friends at the age of four, and soon started finishing each other's sentences and songs. Musically, the way their relationship blurred the boundaries between duality and unity was echoed in the way they sang together and in album titles like
I, Gemini. This kind of union couldn't last forever, though, and Hollingworth and Walton trace the way they grew apart -- and together again -- with moving results on
Two Ribbons. Following the release of 2018's
I'm All Ears, they experienced the growing pains most young women face as they enter their twenties (Walton ended a long-term relationship and discovered her bisexuality), as well as the extraordinary pressure of
Let's Eat Grandma's growing success and the devastating losses of their
Ears collaborator
SOPHIE and of Hollingworth's boyfriend Billy Clayton, who passed from a rare form of bone cancer at 22. Walton and Hollingworth healed their own relationship by giving each other space, and, for the first time, writing songs on their own. As they tell their respective halves of the time that nearly ended their relationship on
Two Ribbons, they muse on the commonalities of endings and beginnings, and above all, their wish to stay best friends. They bookend the album with the poignantly bright synth pop of "Happy New Year," which begins the album by looking forward to another year together, and close it with the gently strummed title track, where they look back and sing that they're "still woven, although we are frayed." In between, they integrate the electronic, rock, and acoustic sounds of
I'm All Ears even more tightly; on "Watching You Go," a propulsive tribute to Clayton, a guitar solo soars over a bed of glimmering electronics. Compared to the united force
Let's Eat Grandma presented on their other albums, the distance between Hollingworth and Walton is often palpable, whether it's the multiplying echoes on their vocals on the
Chvrches-like "Hall of Mirrors," the danceable disorientation of "Levitation," or the naked honesty of "Insect Loop," where Walton sings "At the moment/there is no room/to understand each other's truths" over a deceptively pretty electronic swirl. Yet it's the combination of their separate viewpoints, rather than their previous us-against-the-world unison, that marks the increasing maturity of
Let's Eat Grandma's music on songs such as the spiritually minded "Strange Conversations." Despite the fractured path to its creation,
Two Ribbons is Hollingworth and Walton's most cohesive album yet. They've grown just far enough apart to be themselves, and they've come together to make something equally beautiful and meaningful. ~ Heather Phares