The best pop songs seem to understand that transcendence exists somewhere between euphoria and despair, that the pop alchemy occurs in the strange collision between these opposing, uncontainable emotions. You can hear this on a bubbly hook that suddenly turns on a dime and unzips into a howl, as if the singer were trying to find something like salvation (or even exorcism) on the dance floor; in a guitar riff that rips through a bubble wrap of synths to make its plaintive plea; in the tension playing between a bouncy beat and lyrics copied from either a torn-out diary page or a ransom note. Jenny on Holiday, too, gets that pop is at its best when it’s pinging at these extremes. “The songs always come from a feeling, and the feeling gets overwhelming,” the singer said in a recent interview with the Independent. “I’m like, ‘Bloody hell, I’m going to have to write another pop song.’”
Jenny on Holiday is the moniker of 27-year-old British artist Jenny Hollingworth, who first rose to fame as part of Let’s Eat Grandma, the experimental pop group that she formed with her childhood friend Rosa Walton at the age of thirteen. The pair broke out with their 2018 album I’m All Ears, released when they were just nineteen to widespread critical acclaim; yet, despite this early success, difficulties soon followed: while touring for I’m All Ears, Hollingworth discovered that her then-boyfriend, fellow musician Billy Clayton, had died from a rare form of bone cancer. The duo’s subsequent album, Two Ribbons, was a sensitive portrayal of grief and growing pains, yet working on it took an emotional toll on Hollingworth, forcing her to confront both her boyfriend’s passing and the cracks beginning to show in her friendship with Walton. By the time the two started touring for Two Ribbons, Hollingworth was so anxious that she was dry-heaving before shows.
Quicksand Heart, Hollingworth’s first solo album, invites us into the aftermath, portraying firsthand the opportunity to pick up life’s troubles and work them out through pop. Produced by Steph Marzano (Hayley Williams, Sir Chloe), the album takes 80’s synth-pop as the blueprint, each track fizzing between electric ecstasy and vulnerability. The plodding beat on “These Streets I Know” sounds like footsteps making their way down familiar lanes, pulled this way and that by dusty memories as Hollingworth contemplates her small town that “swells with the weather” and how hard it is to say goodbye. Synths flicker like hazy streetlight halos, and when the bridge’s electric guitar sprawls into a wall of sound, it seems to capture the feeling of being cocooned—even slightly smothered—in a hometown’s embrace. On the poignant ballad “Dolphins”, Hollingworth sings about driving out to the coast and hoping to see dolphins. Otherworldly sheens of synths evoke dolphin calls beckoning from the horizon. At the bridge, Hollingworth cries out “It’s like the feeling you gave me / When you were around” over and over again, and this moment feels like the key to the song—this enduring gratitude for someone’s presence in your life, even if they’re no longer around. How special it is to have met someone like that in the first place, because these meetings are never guaranteed: as serendipitous as spotting dolphins in the night.
But Quicksand Heart’s best songs are those that blow up this wistful melancholy into big, maximalist bangers that make you want to dance all night and let your heart run wild. The title track (instantly reminiscent of a Hounds of Love-era Kate Bush) and “Pacemaker” are, of course, direct callouts to these matters of the heart. The heart—this organ that pumps our blood and keeps us alive but also drives us crazy and makes us do inexplicable things—maintains its presence, even unspoken, throughout the album. The four-on-the-floor pulse of “Push” charges like a racing heartbeat running halfway across town just to see a lover for a night. And “Every Ounce of Me”, one of those delightful little “I’m not in love”-type love songs that’s simply begging to be employed in a bubbly teen rom-com, finds Hollingworth trying her darndest to fight back her feelings; yet the chorus—giddy and buoyant as The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love”—is, just like the rush of love Hollingworth tries in vain to deny, absolutely impossible to resist.
The album is fairly frontloaded in its goodies: nothing quite beats the opening three-track run of explosive synthpop bangers, and the second half of the album lacks the big hooks or earworms—so essential to that winning 80’s formula—that make the first half so compelling. But at its best, Quicksand Heart is a winning example of pure pop pleasure that knows to straddle the line between heartbreak and hope. On the title track, Hollingworth wails “I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.” How stubborn the heart is, always hoping for more despite the pain. How sweet it is, too.
Lydia Wei is a writer based in DC. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Pitchfork, Washingtonian, Washington City Paper, and elsewhere. Find her online at lydia-wei.com.
