On her debut solo album, Quicksand Heart, Jenny Hollingworth is hungry—practically gluttonous—for life. The English singer-songwriter is best known for her work in the darkly surreal duo Let’s Eat Grandma; here, she leans into childlike wonder and joy, pairing it with an ’80s-inspired synth-pop palette. The album’s closing track, power ballad “Appetite,” is even an ode to desire itself: “I’m chewing you up, chewing you up,” she chants on the rousing coda, refusing to apologize for going after what she wants. It recalls the delicious sensory abundance of a Mary Oliver poem: “there is no end/…to the happiness your body/is willing to bear.”
Hollingworth’s arrival at this joyful point was hard-won. She and her bandmate Rosa Walton rose to acclaim with whimsical albums that shapeshifted from SOPHIE-produced, room-shaking pop to droning, distorted rock; for their third record, 2022’s Two Ribbons, the duo explored grief and the tension in their own relationship over more conventional song structures. Hollingworth’s solo record comes after several personally difficult years, including losing her boyfriend to a rare form of bone cancer in 2019. Eventually, as Hollingworth explained to the Independent, she felt ready to “have more fun making music again,” rather than try “to sum up really traumatic parts of my life.”
With Quicksand Heart, she continues on the path she and Walton set on Two Ribbons, leaving behind the band’s more experimental elements and favoring the power of a 4/4 pop song. She infuses her solo debut with nostalgia—beginning with the album’s cover, which shows Hollingworth adorned in her mother’s wedding dress, an ecstatic scream reshaping her face. Channelling the ’80s via Kate Bush and Cyndi Lauper, Hollingworth revels in rollicking choruses fit for shoulder pads. The shimmering, rapturous hook of the title track, for example, packs a euphoric punch, though the song slightly overworks the objects-as-organs imagery. She has a lighter lyrical touch on opening track “Good Intentions,” a would-be John Hughes movie outro, and the pulsating “Every Ounce of Me,” an I-don’t-want-to-fall-in-love banger with synths brighter than the sun.
After the opening flush of these songs, the record’s remainder doesn’t quite reach the same highs. Acoustic ballad “Groundskeeping” drags its feet, sluggish in comparison to preceding tracks. The nostalgic throughline can result in songs that sound too much like their influences, and each other—like “Pacemaker,” an existential mid-album cut that, while catchy, blends into the crowd. Even on her less compelling songs, though, Hollingworth still has a deft pen for hooks—and a few sonic left turns inject adrenaline into the album, like the breakbeats and crusading electric guitar solo on “Do You Still Believe in Me?”
The record’s title points to its central theme: the engulfing, absorbing nature of desire. Perhaps the most accomplished illustration of this comes at the album’s midpoint: the spare and spectral “Dolphins,” which shows off Hollingworth’s mastery of melding happiness and melancholy. Standing on the coast, she looks for dolphins, desperately wanting to meet the wordless gaze of an animal as she grapples with feelings of loss. “It’s like the feeling you gave me, when you were around,” she repeats in the outro, over her own looped vocals, a ghostly dolphin-mimicking synth, and the insistent swell of acoustic guitar. It’s a simple, devastating line, and she wrings every drop of anger, sadness, nostalgia, and hope from it. Here, her grief is an engine for pleasure: an invitation to soak up everything the world has to offer.
