Delicate and threadbare, ‘Two Ribbons’ explores loss and relationship transformation, gently buoyed by restrained acoustic production from long-time collaborator David Wrench (FKA Twigs, The xx, Caribou) who never ceases to expand the band's already singular pop language. The simple beauty of 'Two Ribbons' is a perfect foil for previous fairground-esque single 'Hall Of Mirrors'.

I’m All Ears saw the duo (childhood friends Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton) play major festivals across the globe such as Coachella, Fuji Rock, Primavera Sound & Glastonbury, and won Album Of The Year at the Q Awards, boasting production credits from the late, great SOPHIE (may she rest in power), Wrench (who has also worked with Frank Ocean and Glass Animals), and The Horrors’ Faris Badwan. It was named in top albums of 2018 lists from Pitchfork, The Line of Best Fit, The AV Club, Dazed, The Independent, Loud and Quiet, Rough Trade and more, with local support from triple j, Purple Sneakers, Pilerats, The Music, FBi Radio and beyond. The following year, Let’s Eat Grandma released Soundtrack to Dark Continent: SEMIRAMIS, their score to Tai Shani’s Turner Prize-nominated performance piece, Semiramis.

Then, Let's Eat Grandma disappeared. Friends since early childhood, they had graduated into a teenage friendship that was unbreakable and practically telepathic, but ultimately subject to the same ebbs and flows as any other. There was a time when both felt a little trapped, and needed to fight to create the space to express themselves as individuals within their relationship. And so the partnership began to fray.

Two Ribbons can be heard as a series of letters between the two of them, taking the place of conversation as they try to make sense of the rift in their relationships. It’s a cathartic blood-letting and a devastating realisation about the fickleness of life. Though it is still very much a Let’s Eat Grandma album, for the first time there are Rosa’s songs and Jenny’s songs.

There was a need for Jenny to address in her own writing her relationship with Billy Clayton – a musician who deeply inspired her, which blossomed into love, and a life that was tragically cut short after his battle with a rare form of bone cancer. This important relationship, and her loss, is reflected and refracted in her songs, a writing experience that helped her rebuild her life and make sense of the world again by exploring in a naturalistic yet spiritually fantastical way all of our connections with each other and the world, leaving space for hope but also exploring unanswerable questions and pain.

“I just couldn't get any words out, it was almost like I couldn’t really feel anything,” she remembers of that time, using her writing process as an expression of the inexpressible and a means to exert control over this chaos. “The process of writing these songs, it was almost like me trying to take back my own life.”

At the same time, Rosa was forging a new path for herself. Moving to London for the first time, she started writing, using songs to make sense of her emotions and the world around her. ‘Sunday’ was written around a difficult break up with her first love: “I was writing about trying to hang onto something that has deteriorated and is never going to be the same as it was; a reflection on the good times we had together that will always be there and feeling that simultaneously in a sad and appreciative way”. If you listen to the glistening lead single ‘Hall of Mirrors’, you’ll hear the sound of someone exploring new worlds internally and externally, finding herself adventuring within her sexuality: “The moment in time where our shadows collided and I told the truth, you linked through my fingers and followed me into the hall of mirrors.”

“It’s a very positive song,” Rosa says, “a clear and confident showing of myself”, and although there were a lot of confusing emotions and things that she was figuring out about herself for the first time, “it was very important to me to write about it in this really positive way.” Her work embraces and seeks to understand change in all its forms, tackling challenges with compassion and looking forward to the future and what it may hold with hope, not fear. So this is the backdrop to Two Ribbons: two women navigating their ways through peaks and troughs, for the first time without the tiller of each other to guide them. The songs they wrote and eventually brought to each other are little pockets of light in that darkness, signals in the night to show each other how they were feeling and what they had lost.