Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton have spoken candidly about how the cracks of their lifelong friendship fashioned the idea of Two Ribbons, their new album as Let’s Eat Grandma. The pair have been shut since they had been young children, however whereas touring their second album collectively—2018’s I’m All Ears—they began to really feel pulled in separate instructions. Hollingworth, who additionally skilled a devastating loss when her boyfriend, musician Billy Clayton, handed away from a uncommon type of most cancers in 2019, instructed The Guardian that she felt they had been “basically misunderstanding one another indirectly.” Just like the title track’s core picture—of two fraying ribbons, distinct but tied tightly collectively—they wrote the album’s songs individually, for the primary time of their collaboration.
However regardless of this particular person course of, the result’s their most cohesive undertaking but. They’ve developed dramatically since they emerged in 2016 after they had been nonetheless youngsters. Their debut, I, Gemini, was an intriguing, deliberate mishmash of grunge-y psychedelia and disarming nonsense rhymes, with their increased, softer voices leaning into one another in such a approach that made them indistinguishable. On I’m All Ears, their sound took a extra forceful form by way of a collaboration with the producer SOPHIE, they usually moved past indirect, nonsense lyricism in the direction of a vivid impressionistic type.
Two Ribbons retains the entire light-hearted surreality that made their first two information so bewitching, however out of necessity, the songwriting is braver. This isn’t an “odd ache,” as Hollingsworth sings bitterly on the dramatic ballad “Insect Loop,” however a sense of being yanked aside. Even when the album is ostensibly upbeat, there’s angst between the synth stabs; on “Levitation,” Walton sings of breaking down within the toilet, then going out dancing to overlook about her “catastrophic Saturday” in a frank, diaristic type that avoids the cliché of easy distress. On the glimmering, joyful crush track “Corridor of Mirrors,” there are gloomy photographs that linger: shivering on the London Overground, writing secrets and techniques on toilet partitions, watching the rain in an airport boarding lounge.
The document is punctuated by related mentions of motion, transition, and turbulent climate. Hollingworth opens the gently rolling, new age track “Sunday” with the declaration, “We took the good distance ’around the mountain” earlier than depicting an epic journey below moonbeams and an limitless sky, solely to find that she feels additional away than ever from her touring companion. On the spare, guitar-driven title monitor, Hollingworth delicately compares the motion of relationships in her life to the “the rains that come down in October.” Like these rains, and the fields and rivers that dominate the visible panorama of this album, there’s nothing extra pure than the inevitable ebb and move of individuals out and in of our lives.
