Let’s Eat Grandma’s 2017 debut, I, Gemini, saw two Norwich teenagers barely out of high school turn pop music on its head, baffling and delighting critics in equal measure with a collection of sonic curiosities that delicately balanced whimsy and pathos. Opening up the surreal fairy-tale kingdom of their imagination to the outside world, the record explored the exhilaration and absurdity of teendom through music that was anything but childlike. The pair wrote songs that only they could’ve written, managing to sound like no one else but themselves across freak-folk lullabies, DIY dance-pop and uncategorisable ballads about enchanted mushrooms.
On I’m All Ears, the album that followed, Let’s Eat Grandma invited new characters into the fairy-tale, working with the late SOPHIE, The Horrors’ Faris Badwan and producer David Wrench to begin taking their self-described “experimental sludge-pop” to new places. It’s a direction they’ve continued on their latest record, Two Ribbons. Amplifying their appeal without attenuating the sheer individuality that made their debut so spellbinding, Rosa and Jenny have perfected the pop without sacrificing the sludge. Departing from the hermetic fantasy of their imaginative kingdom into the world outside, their eccentric fables have been replaced by stories drawn from their own lived experience, tales of love, loss and self-discovery that are more powerful than any daydream. Let’s Eat Grandma still write songs that only they could’ve written, but now they’re songs to which all of us can relate.
Following the release of Two Ribbons, we sat down with Rosa Walton to hear more about the creative process behind the new record.
