Photo: El Hardwick Let Rosa Walton make something immediately clear about her and her bandmate, Jenny Hollingworth: “We’re not dating.” “I love how you feel the need to specify that,” Jenny interjects. No, they’re closer than that — the 22- and 23-year-old synth-pop musicians are best friends who’ve been attached since they first bonded in school, over drawing, at age 4. That kinship founded the tight collaboration across their first two albums as a two-person band named after a grammar gag.
JH: I feel like we would always present each other with ideas very early on and then develop them together. Bits would be done individually, but it would be things to bring to the table. RW: The whole point of the song “Ava” was that you can’t always help people or fix something. That could apply to our relationship — sometimes you’ve just got to accept that different things happen to people. You have to live with that.JH: I didn’t write for a long time after my boyfriend passed away. So it naturally came about that Rosa was writing on her own for a while, because I think it’s important that she stay creatively busy for her mental health.
JH: Same with “Watching You Go.” Rosa did a lot of guitar on that song at the end. We know what the other person’s good at. We know where they’d be able to fill in a gap that we’re not able to reach — whether that be something as obvious as a solo or a section of the track — and then we’d give each other freedom to write. But the other person would be writing with what you have in mind for the song, and we don’t really try to edit the other very much.
RW: The fact that we’ve written so much about each other, I think, says a lot about the amount of love and care we have for each other.It’s really beautiful to hear that the two of you were both independently deciding to write songs about or to the other person.JH: We both just had a lot that was unexpressed towards each other. Songwriting was and is both our ways of doing that.