CD of The Week

Guess Grandma wasn't filling enough. After three impressive albums with Rosa Walton as Let's Eat Grandma, Jenny Hollingsworth is hungry for more. More in life, more to love, more to feel. That sense of hunger permeates her debut solo album as Jenny on Holiday, right down to its title. Fittingly, Quicksand Heart is an endlessly absorbing, open-hearted ode to wanting and wonder.

After 2022's Two Ribbons filtered themes of loss (Hollingsworth's partner had succumbed to cancer three years prior) and estrangement through Let's Eat Grandma's signature fairy-dusted future pop, Quicksand Heart flips the coin and explores the need to experience joy that came after processing those feelings. Hollingsworth even said as much in interviews, expressing a readiness to have fun again after so much trauma and drama.

Ironically, while looking forward lyrically, she ends up peeking backward musically. A healthier, heartier sheen of '80s nostalgia reflects off the songs here. This decade has always been prominent on Hollingsworth’s mood boards, but this time she eschews the more esoteric angles of influences like Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, and the like in favor of their anthemic choruses. Appetites for these sounds are as ravenous as ever, and Hollingsworth offers a modest banquet that does those original recipes justice.

The album's thesis carries through and climaxes on final ballad "Appetite,” where Hollingsworth asserts how the limit to the amount of happiness one can experience does not exist. In short, there's no way to fully satiate true hunger. But as long as artists like Jenny Hollingsworth know how to feed us, happiness will still be on the menu.