Jenny On Holiday – Quicksand Heart: Album Review

Live4ever 9 January, 2026

Artwork for the Jenny On Holiday album Quicksand Heart

3.5 starsss

‘Quicksand Heart’ is Jenny On Holiday’s show going on, finely tuned pop sentiment that also has a wide streak of endearing vulnerability.

It’s one of the great performer-related cliches, sounding now like it belongs to another, less empathetic era.

‘The show must go on’, most often used in conjunction with the wearing of a pancake-faced smile, was a metaphor that reflected society’s demands for entertainment at the expense of repressing our own feelings.

townsendmusic banner

If we choose to mask the hurt less so now, then it’s not so much regarded to our detriment.

Jenny Hollingworth is no different. Having burst onto the scene a decade ago as one half of teenage psych-folk duo Let’s Eat Grandma in partnership with Rosa Walton, the pair’s debut I, Gemini and its 2018 successor I’m All Ears were generously drowned in positive appreciation and year-end list placings.

Then came the more difficult times. Inseparable since they were at primary school, the pair’s relationship began to untangle, whilst Hollingworth’s friend Billy Clayton died at only 22 and their musical inspiration Sophie passed in 2021.

The subsequent album Two Ribbons arrived with that backwash and in the miasma of post-COVID uncertainty, a record that seemed both cathartic yet weary at the same time.

If growth in the following period was necessary, it was on her own terms.

Jenny On Holiday is a joke about her moonlighting from her own band, but although it’s a solo project in kind of name, Walton has remained in the background nourishing the process.

At the outset writing began at her parental home, the Logic made demos, ‘an absolute state’, until they were worked on with Grammy nominated producer Steph Marziano, who followed the instruction to lean into the singer’s idiosyncratic vision of pop.

As Jenny Hollingworth has revealed, in this articulation fore and backgrounds merged: “I wanted to push at the edge of the universe of pop and make these big, bold songs about my fear of dying and things going wrong in my life and finding my feet again on the ground. That’s my pop.”

Quite.

Quicksand Heart opener Good Intentions harnesses this skyline busting aesthetic, all neat, polished synths on the bubble’s edge but uncertainty underneath, manifested in the lyrical confusion heard in lines such as, ‘Cause if we’re damned to find/That we were screwed from the start/Then let’s go dancing tonight/To spite them all’.

If that’s the taster, Quicksand Heart’s title-track is even more revealing, the CHVRCHES-esque flourishes spiked by a refrain that’s an honest assessment of being capable of love when you’re from the 50p off shelf: ‘I’ve got a heart made of quicksand/I’ve got bones made of fucked up straw’.

Closer Appetite holds the listener’s feet even closer to the fire, the glossy, Ladyhawke retro vibe supplanted by the starkness of messages like, ‘I was knocked out for ages/Said they feared for my life’.

Not that the effect is maudlin, and on Every Ounce Of Me the zingy rock workout, complete with guitar solo, propels a love song of sorts, or more accurately a how to resist love type love song. It’s one of the album’s peaks.

Strong enough to resist the quirk, the fun facts are still worth knowing: These Streets I Know started out in Hollingworth’s adolescent bedroom, whilst the beat-laden Pacemaker was written viewing clips of 90’s Tour de France cyclists.

The most interesting, if not necessarily perfect track however, is Do You Still Believe In Me?, on which Jenny Hollingworth finds her sense of freewheeling scuzz, sounding at once lost but also snap focused and in the moment.

Quicksand Heart is Jenny Holingworth’s show going on. A record of finely tuned pop sentiment that also has a wide streak of endearing vulnerability through it, it’s proof that even if you’re crying on the inside, you should always leave them wanting more.

Andy Peterson

YouTube video

Tags:andy peterson, Jenny On Holiday