Let’s be real, falling in love can feel good, but it can also feel really, really bad. At the best of times, it can feel like going over the edge of some colossal rollercoaster, your heart pounding as your guts climb up into your throat. At its worst, it can feel like having your soul ripped to shreds by jackal demons while your mind is slowly erased, your body being packed full of sawdust and black powder. Let’s also be real, falling in love comes in many different shapes and forms. You can fall in love with a city, even one you’ve known your whole life. You can fall in love with a person. You can fall in love with yourself. You can also fall out of love with any of these things, with disastrous and healing consequences.
Miraculously, Jenny Hollingworth captures it all on Quicksand Heart, an intimate, confessional record wrapped in a glossy, pretty synthpop package. Like the last Let’s Eat Grandma record, 2022’s Two Ribbons, Quicksand Heart finds Hollingworth reflecting on the tragic, unexpected death of her partner Billy Clayton, who passed away from a rare form of bone cancer in 2019, as well as her temporary estrangement of her lifelong friend and Let’s Eat Grandma bandmate Rosa Walton, who Hollingworth feared was leaving her behind in the wake of her moving to London and scoring a hit single on her own with “I Really Want to Stay at Your House” with Hallie Coggins, which became a breakout success when it was included on the Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack.
Despite being written from the perspective of the one left behind, Quicksand Hearts transforms her sour grapes into champagne, casting her lovelorn, heartbroken ballads of emptiness and brokenness over soaring, glamorous 1980s pop the size of Alpha Centauri. In the glorious album opener “Good Intentions”, Hollingworth sends her self-effacing lyrics about refilling her heart after being hollowed out by takers into the stratosphere, setting an ecstatic, euphoric climax over glittery Cyndi Lauper synths and sturdy teen pop beats that’s one of the most chillingly beautiful pop moments of the 2020s.
Likewise, “Quicksand Heart” places Hollingworth’s metaphors for being fundamentally broken over Big Music guitars, bringing to mind The Guardian‘s apt comparison to another of the album’s singles, the equally delicious, devastating “Every Ounce of Me”, whose “bittersweet bounce bridges the gap between Olivia Rodrigo and the Waterboys“. Considering that single, we’d go one better with “Concrete Blonde by way of Grimes“.
The warm, euphoric rush pauses for a moment of calm introspection of “These Streets I Know”, a mid-tempo ballad about the love someone has for their hometown–Norwich, England, in Hollingsworth’s case. It’s beyond refreshing to hear an appreciation for the familiar in a genre so often obsessed with novelty. There’s still plenty of love for the brand new, too, though. In “Pacemaker”, Hollingworth talks about needing “a shock to remember I’m still alive”. In “Dolphins”, Jenny on Holiday explores the urge to be as wild, free, and unfettered as an aquatic mammal. In “Groundskeeping”, she uses picking up a gardening habit as a metaphor for cultivating new love. It’s an impressively broad scope without ever becoming try-hard or forced.
Quicksand Heart is as good as pop gets. It finds the perfect equilibrium between authenticity and vulnerability and craft and accessibility. It also finds the sweet spot for nostalgia, effortlessly integrating the best of 1980s music while disregarding the formula and sincerity. It’s got the big, bold, brash guitars of a Phil Collins; the sweet, romantic synths of the Bangles or Debbie Gibson, and the stripped-down beats of a hardware drum machine without succumbing to boom-bap cliches. For anyone who’d wished that M83 hadn’t covered the hearts on their sleeves with so much varnish or that Grimes hadn’t ditched the experimentation, you’re going to get a lot of spins out of Jenny on Holiday’s Quicksand Heart in 2026.