Today, alt-pop visionary Jenny On Holiday releases her debut solo album ‘Quicksand Heart’ via Transgressive Records. Known to many as one half of the critically acclaimed duo Let’s Eat Grandma, Jenny Hollingworth now reintroduces herself with a voice that is both familiar and strikingly new. The result is music that feels both intimate and expansive, rooted in a new found joy in the lightness of being. Jenny is curious and in love with life again.
Ushering in a powerful new chapter of Hollingworth’s artistry — one propelled by a new sense of clarity — ‘Quicksand Heart’ is a record that is driving and immediate, to be sung with friends in the festival pit or hummed alone on the night bus. A striking image, a “quicksand heart” is a whorling vortex of feeling, a pulsating pit of emotion; it’s how Jenny On Holiday describes how she gives and receives love.
“I used to get this feeling that everyone had hearts made of different materials—and I felt like mine was a bit defective. I feel like my heart and my head are all made from the wrong things. That image is about wanting to be loved, and to love and live as a human does, despite the fact you’re maybe like the Tinman in The Wizard of Oz.” - Jenny On Holiday
Written in the stillness of Norwich summers and finished in London with producer Steph Marziano (Hayley Williams, Nell Mescal), ‘Quicksand Heart’ introduces Jenny’s cinematic solo sound — grounded in plain-spoken storytelling yet expansive in its pop imagination. Inspired by the likes of Prefab Sprout to The Beach Boys, Kate Bush and Cyndi Lauper, Hollingworth and Marziano came up with ‘Jenny on Holiday’—a playful name in keeping with the lexicon of L.E.G. “I am basically on holiday from the band,” Hollingworth says wickedly. This is a record of joy, power, and abundance, fizzing with energy that sweeps up raw and punky basslines a la The Replacements, twinkling synths, and otherworldly, expressive vocal shades that recall Elizabeth Fraser. Production is upfront and bold, and even its most melancholic rhythms blush with pop sensibilities.
Quicksand Heart’s artwork is shot by Steve Gullick—a legendary photographer who has lensed everyone from Nirvana to PJ Harvey—and casts Hollingworth as a hyper-saturated, sensual, hypnotic protagonist, wearing her mother’s wedding dress. “It’s not to reflect typical kinds of romances, but a love of life,” she says of the visual and aural imagery. It’s this energy, too, that she’s excited to bring to the stage and live shows again - beginning with an intimate in-store tour across the UK this month.
‘EVERY OUNCE OF ME’ (live session)
Gworth and Rosa Walton signed to Transgressive Records at age 16 and released their juggernaut debut I, Gemini in 2016, a strange strain of melodic electronic, freaky folk pop. 2018’s critically acclaimed I’m All Ears expanded into fantastical new sonic territories, anchored by sweet yet acerbic vocals, uncanny lyrics, and the late SOPHIE’s mutant productions: “Hot Pink” was its anthem, sweeping through AOTY lists. 2022 brought them back to band mode with the powerful Two Ribbons — it starkly captured personal experience of grief and the changing shape of their friendship, as they grew into womanhood. The image no longer of twins, but of two unfurling fabrics, was pertinent, and the two have since focused on nurturing their friendship, alongside pursuing their shared desire to explore themselves as solo artists.
Now, Jenny On Holiday arrives fully realised, with a sound that is entirely her own. The quicksand heart cannot be quelled. It is a celebration of life.