Following tracks include a deep synth banger called ‘Eat Shiitake Mushrooms’, featuring cute J-pop vocals and girlish rapping – the kind of song that PC Music have been trying to land on radio playlists for the last two years. There’s the distorted stromp of ‘Sax In The City’, too, ‘Chocolate Sludge Cake’, which features a pagan-sounding school recorder and pat-a-cake singsong, and a beautifully harmonized folk song accompanied by a mandolin, entitled ‘Chimpanzees in Canopies’. It’s a record that features no sampled instruments or extra musicians – every keyboard, guitar, drum, saxophone, harmonica, mandolin, cello, recorder, glockenspiel and ukulele was played by Rosa and Jenny, practically in a different, strange style on each of the 10 experimental tracks.
“Because we were listening to so much pop music we worked out the aspects we liked but also what we didn’t like from pop music,” says Rosa. “For example, if you listen to a whole album of pop, it gets really samey, and that was the point where we thought how about we make an album where every song is in a different style.
“We can’t wait for people to hear ‘Eat Shiitake Mushrooms’, because they’ve got us pinned as these creepy girls, which is how we’ve been presenting ourselves. But another part of our whole creepy thing is partly about not conforming to stereotypes. A lot of people do expect females in the music industry to be docile and acoustic and we’re not either of those things.”
“The aim is to create a really strong response from people,” adds Jenny, “and that’s why it’s really fun having really jumpy tracks, because people are like ‘What!?’, and we’re like, ‘Yeaaah!’ As female artists, and especially young ones, you get so many people who think you’re going to sit down and play some folk, and then we bring the big synths in…
“When people talk about emotions they talk about them as if they’re really clear cut, and they’re really not like that,” she says. “From when we talk about how we feel about things, it’s really difficult to tell exactly how you feel. It’s conflicting and confusing, and I guess that’s how it comes across as scary sometimes. And that’s how the album’s ended up pretty dark.”
Its payoff is a closing ukulele rendition of the opening ‘Deep Six Textbook’ – the darling version you’d hear on an advert of an online dating site. “That’s like, ‘we’re teenage girls,’” says Jenny. “‘You thought we’d be doing this throughout the whole album but here it is right at the end, just to make you feel more secure.’”
When the rain really starts to come down in Easton Park we jump in a taxi to an artists’ studio in the centre of town. It’s just gone 3pm and the school Rosa left last year has recently kicked out. A kid she knows called Kyle is walking home, which instigates more laughter as we zip by.
Rosa and Jenny are themselves enrolled in music college, where Let’s Eat Grandma counts towards their final grade. It’s called Access To Music and it’s where they recorded their album while they were still finishing their GCSEs. The facilities are a major perk, while the curriculum is based around how genres develop and a more experimental approach to composition. Rosa says that it’s important for them to be in the company of other teenagers, too, “otherwise you feel really separated.”
When I ask them how their music fits in with the other students’ they say that it doesn’t – there are a lot of traditional band setups.
Once the A&R clamour was over (and LEG really did have their pick of the indies) and Rosa and Jenny had signed with Transgressive, they tried to keep their new deal to themselves. Their classmates found out online, and were unanimously supportive. Still, it must feel strange for Rosa and Jenny – young adults enrol in music college as a step towards life as a jobbing musician, in one form or other; they’d managed it within five months of their first year. So what of college now? Rosa is still hopeful that they’ll be able to complete their second year, but doesn’t appear too confident that their commitment to the band will allow it.