How Jenny on Holiday built a pop edifice from personal ruins

Certainly, the artist born Jenny Hollingworth has seen more than the average 27-year-old in several respects. At just 16, she got her start in the record business after signing to Transgressive as one half of experimental pop duo Let’s Eat Grandma. Working with bandmate Rosa Walton, she was making some of the buzziest records in indie music. They were going on tour, they were critics’ darlings — the kind of early success most musical upstarts dream of.

But just a few years later, Hollingworth also suffered a major personal tragedy. Her then-boyfriend, fellow musician Billy Clayton, passed away in 2019 from a rare form of bone cancer. Much of her processing that grief appeared on Let’s Eat Grandma’s 2022 record, Two Ribbons; so did her unpacking of the evolution of her friendship with Walton and the mundane growing pains that come with feeling one’s way through adolescence. The record and its era was, for Hollingworth, extremely emotionally intense. As she waded through it, a more profound question emerged: how do you go about living normally on the other side?

Answering that question led Hollingworth all the way to her own solo project, Jenny on Holiday, and her debut record under the moniker Quicksand Heart. “A lot of it — this is actually quite deep, but we’ll go for it — is about the feeling of feeling bad about still living when somebody’s not here anymore," Hollingworth explains from her childhood bedroom in Norwich. "And for me personally, after I somehow managed to get past the feeling bad, I just felt very determined and very lucky to be here and be able to make records. I wanted to try my best to make the most of that opportunity.”

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To note, much of Quicksand Heart is still intense. Though the beats and arrangements are synth-pop bubbly — by way of producer Steph Marziano (Hayley Williams, Bartees Strange, Cassandra Jenkins) — the lyrical content grapples very much with an ache to be alive, the responsibility of the living, and how to do that right. References abound to the heart, from which the album takes its name, highlighting the fragility of this thing (one track is even called “Pacemaker”) that is both the very thing that gives us life and represents the core of our emotional being. Indeed, towards the end of the record’s titular track, Hollingworth nearly screams: “How our love / Never dies never dies never dies / I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive.”

“I was really into running at the time of making the record,” Hollingworth remembers. “I had my heart rate monitor on my wrist all the time, and I think maybe the heart thing — which is across so many of the songs — is obviously about this thing that’s pumping blood around your body and making you alive, but also the intensity of that emotion. Quicksand Heart feels like it just sums up me as a person, or how I feel I am. So, naming the record that [since] it’s a solo record just made a lot of sense.”

Going solo, for Hollingworth, was less a cut-and-dry inflection point and rather a natural transition. Walton had been doing much of her own solo writing and had built up a substantial catalog of material. Hollingworth had started doing the same shortly thereafter. Given that both seemed to be trying their separate hands at the same time, seeing those efforts through felt like the worthwhile next step.

Hollingworth’s curiosity to try writing on her own thus didn’t necessitate any big split - rather, it became almost like a scenic route detour. A holiday, literally, from the band. It was producer Marziano who first pointed that perspective out to her and suggested the name Jenny on Holiday, a nod to both her offshoot from Let’s Eat Grandma and her given surname. Hollingworth liked it, and so Jenny on Holiday was born.

When it came time to record, the Philadelphia‐bred, East London‐based Marziano was the immediate obvious production pick. Hollingworth originally met Marziano at the urging of her manager, Tim, when Let’s Eat Grandma was asked to hop on a remix version of “JUST PRETEND (CREDITS)” by Bad Omens. Marziano was brought in to help record it: “ I think Tim was secretly thinking of doing that so we could meet each other and see whether we got on, because he had this vision of us making a record together,” Hollingworth says.

She put batches of demos together in her home in Norwich, and bring them into London to workshop them with Marziano. She’d started writing the songs in 2024, and by 2025, she was finally in the studio. “[The demos] would usually be in a complete state, every part would be completely out of time, and I’d go in being like: ‘I’ve got this crazy idea, Steph,’” she laughs, explaining her usual working routine. But Marziano was game for all of it. Bringing her background as a drummer, she helped give Quicksand Heart the intensity and drive Hollingworth was craving, even while keeping it sonically light and pop-y. “A lot of my songwriting is quite emo, apparently,” Hollingworth jokes, referencing Marziano.

“It was very, very scary, I think. I was quite nervous about it, to be honest, the whole way through,” Hollingworth says of the transition. “Eventually I was like, Well, I’m doing it now, so I’m gonna have to get the bloody thing done.” After working in a duo constantly for more than a decade, stepping out on her own was a bit like learning to walk again, minus an appendage. It required different personal strengths, and it forced Hollingworth to flex different muscles. This is all aside from the workload, which itself multiplies when you move from two co-captains of a project down to one.

The lead time on the project, for example, was so long simply because the prospect of making it happen was so daunting. “I was really determined to try and find enjoyment in making music again and getting back into doing what I love doing most in my life,” she tells me. “I love Two Ribbons, I’m very proud of it as a record and what it represents, but it was also quite emotionally heavy to make. Making records is always going to be challenging, but I think that I wanted to prove to myself that I still had it in me to make music and enjoy doing it.”

She’d reached that point where, she realized, she just needed to be happy. She still carries all of her experiences with her, but making Quicksand Heart was something of a rope she grabbed on to and used to pull herself into a new reality. “You can still hear how those experiences have affected me in the songs, but maybe in a slightly different light,” she says.

“Since my mum got married at my age, I’m like, Well, what am I doing? I’m making records. I’ve got no one to marry in this dress, so I’m gonna put it on the cover,” she grins.

That existentialism translates to the sound of Quicksand Heart, too. It’s a bold pop record that features everything from strobing synths to orchestral arrangements, blending those otherworldly elements with chunky, underground indie guitar tones. Hollingworth also pushes herself vocally, focusing on bringing true, big leads melodically more than she ever has before. The goal, she says, was to make everything as direct as possible. This was surely achieved; the end result of the project sounds a bit like a hooky and fresh cross of Kate Bush and Robyn. And it was also to make things fun. “A lot of the songs that I wrote on Two Ribbons, they were so, understandably, sad and emotional," she says. "That’s not the only thing that I am. I’m not just a really sad person all the time. I’m quite a playful person, I like going out and having fun. Obviously, when you’re really down, you’re gonna want to write some sad songs. But that’s not all I can do."

Her inspiration palette going into the project was a lot of 80s, especially the era’s indie-pop bands like Prefab Sprout. As she scrolls through her inspiration playlist, she also throws out classics like The Replacements, Prince, and Cyndi Lauper. All the big pop stars appear on her vision board, too. The through-line to it all was, she says, “block party, real sticky dance floor stuff.” She wanted a record she could picture people moving to, connecting to, and living to.

“I love pop at its biggest umbrella, because I think a pop song can be across genres,” she tells me. “Like, The Jesus and Mary Chain, even though they’re a shoegaze band, those are pop songs.” She’s certainly not wrong. Perhaps one of the biggest themes of mainstream pop music in the last five years has been pushing the genre’s boundaries to see how far it can go. The legacy of SOPHIE, A. G. Cook, and the other great experimental producers of the 2010s has opened up a landscape that’s defined not by its Top 40 listenability but rather its attitude. And that attitude is defined by radical acceptance, confidence in coming to the table just as one is. It translates to a sound that’s big, even in its quiet moments, and embraces oddities.

In her own way, Hollingworth’s record adds to that lexicon. Her version of pop is an exercise in persona building and the performance of addictive largesse. That she used this persona to come out of a long period of darkness only makes the power of the project and the genre it riffs off of more poignant. The word she returns to over and over as we continue to chat is catharsis. And the more she talks about catharsis, the more I seem to wonder if Quicksand Heart was almost a necessary excretion, a true personal inflection point. “[With pop], I’ve always enjoyed that, even if you’re writing about a dark subject matter, people can still dance to it,” she says.

“It’s accessible and hooky, but [it] can also be weird and interesting,” she says of her interpretation of the genre. “Sometimes I feel like it’s quite a bright and over the top record in some ways. It can be a bit scary, because you’re like, is this just too ridiculous? But I am ridiculous.” Trying to write something standoffish and casually cool just wouldn’t fit who she is.

Notably, Hollingworth also has over a decade of experience to pull from in this space. She first started making music as a preteen, forming Let’s Eat Grandma at just 13. In those early years, she says, the duo barely knew how to use music software. Everything was in the room. They’d go to gigs and just try to keep it all together. As the years went by, they added competencies to their toolkit. On the group’s second record, I’m All Ears, they finally learned Logic Pro, allowing their sonic world to get bigger. That record they wrote entirely collaboratively. By Two Ribbons, Hollingworth and Walton took the next step of starting to write more individually, refining their own visions and voices.

“It’s been a helluva journey,” Hollingworth says sarcastically. “Obviously, in any band, you have high points and low points, but that’s just the work of being in a band. I just want to continue making music and giving it my best go, the career highs and the career lows.”

And even though Hollingworth is, at the moment, technically solo, there are so many ways in which she wasn’t. Walton, to be sure, was still around for support. “My label and Rosa have been really supportive, which is very lucky,” Hollingworth acknowledges. “Me and Rosa send each other demos as well, which is quite helpful because obviously I very much value her opinion, and we’re kind of going through the process at the same time. So even though I’m kind of having to do it alone, that makes it slightly less isolating.” The pair still do label and PR playbacks together, even for material they’ve recorded alone. They’re at each other’s side for critique, for advice, and for everything in between.

“It’s easier to get in your own head about things and overanalyse everything. I made my manager set me loads of deadlines,” she continues and giggles. Those due dates, she clarifies, weren’t necessarily always strictly kept, but they were better than nothing. As the saying goes, the hardest part of making art is always knowing when to stop. “It’s easy to get very perfectionistic about things, but sometimes it’s just not going to get any better and you need to move on to the next level.”

At the time of our conversation, just before the holidays, Hollingworth is zeroing into the last few weeks before her release. After all this time, the prospect of finally having a solo project out in the world is becoming real. So much has changed for her, and yet so much is still the same. For one, she’s still in the childhood room she was raised in. “This is the backdrop,” she says and points to her surroundings. “There were so many records made in this room, it’s actually funny.”

Her parents, for their part, have always been constants. She moved out for a period of time, but subsequently moved back again. “You can’t get rid of me,” she jokes. Still, having that support system has been essential for pressing on and continuing to take the risks she has. “They were always sort of like, ‘Oh, well, she’s making a song, so we need to encourage her with that,’” she says.

But as the record comes out, she senses more change on the horizon, too. Most of her friends, she says, have moved to London, so that could be in the cards. “I’m like, ‘I can’t do it without you mate,’” she laughs. And, so much of her scene is in the city, too. With Transgressive Records based out of London and more bands pouring into the city by the year, the pull is somewhat magnetic.

“It’s just so weird,” she says of the waiting period she’s in. “I just have no idea how people are going to respond, to be honest. Whether it’s going to resonate or not. So, there is a bit of nervousness about that.” But alongside the jitters, there’s also an infectious excitement. “Sometimes, it’s good to just make something, release it out into the world, and be able to enter a new chapter.” With Quicksand Heart, Hollingworth has both found closure and opened a new door.