Let’s Eat Grandma’s Electro Pop Is Glittery. Its Subjects Are Weighty.

Let’s Eat Grandma spent part of the fall of 2019 in a series of seaside Airbnbs on the coast of Norwich, England. The town was so small it was impossible to find a store that sold bath towels, so the duo endured one five-day stretch sharing the same tea towel they used to dry the dishes. It was here that Rosa Walton played her bandmate and best friend Jenny Hollingworth the song that could have ended their group.

Walton had written the track a year before, when the two were preparing to tour England as the effervescent, psychedelic British electro-pop band Let’s Eat Grandma. (The name is a grammar joke ripped from the punctuation book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” a wink with just a hint of horror.) Their second album, “I’m All Ears,” had just brought a new level of acclaim at home and in the United States, and a slot at Coachella. But in their day-to-day interactions, Hollingworth and Walton were fissuring and floundering.

“You end up acting even weirder, because you’re trying so hard to act normal,” Walton said. On “Two Ribbons,” their new album out on April 29, they confront the distance between them with aching acuity, over a soundtrack of kaleidoscopic synths and glimmering pop beats.

Hollingworth and Walton aren’t just bandmates; they’ve been inseparable since kindergarten, when Walton wandered up to Hollingworth, who was drawing an orange snail, and asked, “Do you want to be my friend?” By 13, they were performing as a band, booking gigs in Norwich. Their 2016 debut, “I, Gemini,” was a frenetic album of distorted, twitchy pop with song titles like “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms” and “Chocolate Sludge Cake.” Their voices were so innocently childlike, people asked them if they’d pitched up their vocals. In music videos, they styled themselves as twins, with cascades of tangled hair and matching white dresses.

But during tour rehearsals for their second album, suddenly the duo so used to blurring into each other and communicating with an ease and intensity that bordered on telepathy stopped being able to finish each other’s sentences.

Over the course of the tense tour for “I’m All Ears,” Walton cobbled together the verses for “Insect Loop,” the raw song that she believed could threaten their bond entirely. “You never noticed,” she sings on the track over the vigorous guitar strumming that breaks in between mournful riffs. “Dunk my head in the bathtub and scream underwater/’Cause maybe I thought you didn’t care.”

This is the toned-down version, Walton, 22, and Hollingworth, 23, said in a recent video call. Walton was perched in a chair in her record label’s London office, while Hollingworth, who signed on with the display name “cool dog,” was in her bedroom in Norwich, where neon posters that had come with a My Bloody Valentine album studded the fluorescent-purple walls. Throughout the hour-and-a-half-long discussion, they giggled as they talked over each other, gesturing with frenzied hands to let the other speak first. They started to grow distant, they explained, as they were adjusting to the anxieties of their nascent niche fame, and growing out of the routines that had anchored their friendship in its early years.

It wasn’t a decision, they said, to start writing about the gap that was growing between them — the songs just seeped out. That didn’t make sharing them any easier.

When Hollingworth first heard “Insect Loop,” she was shocked at how angry it sounded, the rage coiled inside every verse. “Rosa was just expressing herself, because I’m sure there’s stuff I did at the time that was hurtful,” Hollingworth said, as light from a nearby window fell over the brash line of her bangs. “It’s all a mess, basically,” she added with a laugh. “And that’s just one song.”

Instead of a dramatic reconciliation, she and Walton stitched their friendship together in real time as they made the record. “The writing process, the recording process, was all about working through those rifts gradually,” Hollingworth said. “We had to confront those feelings constantly through the songs.”

Walton and Hollingworth tried to build in time to decompress and repair their relationship. At night in the Airbnbs, they made pesto pasta and watched “Euphoria”; during the day, they sat by the waves and tinkered with the bridge of “Insect Loop.” They gave themselves space, for the first time in their careers, to write separately. Each time one of them played a song for the other, they ended up talking about the underlying anguish and anxiety.

In addition to the distance between them, there were other serious issues at hand. “We’re becoming ancient,” Walton said of the group’s forced rapid maturation. In March 2019, Hollingworth’s boyfriend, the electronic musician Billy Clayton, died from a rare form of bone cancer. Hollingworth describes the rage and despair of his struggle with treatment on the new track “Watching You Go” — “I’m not wasting it,” she cries over a constellation of synths. Let’s Eat Grandma canceled its U.S. tour dates, except for Coachella, which it played in April that year as a tribute to Clayton.

At some point during the festival, Hollingworth had thought back to a young adult book, Patrick Ness’s “A Monster Calls,” in which a 13-year-old boy has recurring nightmares about his mother, who has terminal cancer, falling off a cliff. She keeps a copy in her bedroom now, and held it up to the screen. “It’s one of the best books about grief I’ve read,” she said. “It resonated with me, the difficulty of dealing with the idea that somebody’s actually going to die. It’s difficult to register your emotions. You have this numbness.”

During the strict coronavirus lockdown in England, Hollingworth and Walton would walk to a nearby cemetery, partly because they were desperate to see nature, but partly to work through their grief. In addition to Clayton, in January 2021 they lost Sophie, the transformative producer who taught them how to piece together glitchy, contortionist pop. “It’s almost too soon to see how big her influence will be,” Hollingworth said. “Because we’re too close to it.”

With so much loss and uncertainty in the air, the duo tried to capture the scene of those cemetery strolls for the album, in a wordless, minute-and-a-half-long track called “In the Cemetery” that consists mainly of winding synths and flutters of birdsong.

That interlude offers the listener a breather, said David Wrench, who produced the album. It was just the three of them in a London studio, intermittently over an 18-month period; Hollingworth and Walton would duck out at lunch and buy Cadbury Creme Eggs, and Wrench would cycle through his collection of Timbuktu Records releases to “clear our ears out.” When they listened to early iterations of the album, “it was almost too much at one point,” Wrench said on a phone call from his studio. “It’s quite emotionally intense.”

The cemetery walks happened when Walton and Hollingworth were living five minutes apart from each other in Norwich, after a strained period when Walton had moved to London. But when lockdown restrictions made it difficult for them to see each other, they resorted to video chats and calls. The upheaval and disorientation of the pandemic permeates the record. “Levitation” traces a panic attack on a bathroom floor. “Hall of Mirrors” unfolds over jittery beats.

In January, Let’s Eat Grandma played its first shows in years, in London, and was thrilled and terrified to see that the audience knew the words to such intimate, scalding tracks. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous in my bloody life,” Hollingworth said. In videos from the performance, the bandmates bound across the stage and sling their arms around each other. When they play the title track from “Two Ribbons,” Hollingworth grips the mic with both hands and keeps looking across the stage at Walton, bent over her guitar in the yellow light.

“I just want to be your best friend,” Hollingworth sings, her voice shaking slightly. “Just like it always was.”