Let’s Eat Grandma, the duo composed of songwriters, multi-instrumentalists and vocalists Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth, today share Happy New Year.
The track is an upbeat, blissful song celebrating friendship, and the opening track from their upcoming much anticipated third full-length album, Two Ribbons.
“Happy New Year is a celebratory song written about my relationship with my best friend. I wrote it after a breakdown between us that lasted for a long period of time, to communicate to her how important she is to me and how our bond and care for each other goes much deeper than this difficult time,” Walton said of the track.
“I used the setting of New Year as both an opportunity for reflection, looking back nostalgically through childhood memories that we shared, and to represent the beginning of a fresh chapter for us. I’d been struggling to come to terms with the fact that our relationship had changed, but as the song and time progresses I come to accept that it couldn’t stay the way it was when we were kids forever, and start to view it as a positive thing – because now we have been able to grow into our own individual selves.”
With a video featuring the band embroiled in a tennis match-turned-party, Happy New Year is the third song to be heard from Two Ribbons following the album’s stunning, melancholic title track Two Ribbons and the ethereal, glistening pop song, Hall Of Mirrors, about a beautiful, intense moment remembered, with the latter attracting airplay on triple j and both tracks across community radio nationwide.
Let’s Eat Grandma released their second album, I’m All Ears, in 2018. It came out to a blaze of critical glory, thrilled fans who’d been with them since I, Gemini, and won them interested new listeners as they widened their musical scope. They won Album of the Year at the Q Awards along with many end of year list placements, toured relentlessly, played a life-changing set at Coachella, and then… they disappeared.
Two Ribbons tells the story of the last three years from both Jenny and Rosa’s points of view.
Such was the intensity of Jenny and Rosa’s bond that when they promoted their first album, they positioned themselves as twins. Friends since early childhood, they had graduated into a teenage friendship that was unbreakable and practically telepathic. Those intense and all-consuming friendships are subject to the same ebbs and flows as any other, and as they grew older the two began to find themselves as individuals, tastes differing here, reactions jarring there. There was a time when both felt a little trapped, and needed to fight to create the space to express themselves as individuals within their relationship.
And so the partnership began to fray. Two Ribbons can be heard as a series of letters between the two of them, taking the place of conversations as they try to make sense of the rift in their relationships. It’s a cathartic blood-letting and a devastating realisation about the fickleness of life. Though it is still very much a Let’s Eat Grandma album, for the first time there are Rosa’s songs and Jenny’s songs.
Two Ribbons is an album that treads a fine line expressing the most intimate feelings of, whilst making space for, the different perspectives of two women; an album that says this is not the beginning or the end but part of a never-ending circle. It’s cyclical in nature; there is sadness, and pain, and joy, and hope – and knows that no matter what detours we take, we are all connected.
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