The Orange Box

What's leaving, what's coming in, and a Jenny On Holiday review.

An orange and brown box stands on the wooden floor in my sitting room. It has a hinged lid (the brown part) with an off-white handle for carrying the box when it’s closed. There are clasps that hold the lid shut. They are lockable, though I’ve never owned the key that would lock or unlock them. They have that kind of fastening (it must have a name) whereby pushing downwards on the lock part opens the clasps, which pop up with a pleasing speed and vigour.

The box stands in front of some shelving units that hold several hundred LPs. In case it weren’t obvious, that location provides a strong hint at what’s inside the box.

I can’t remember how long I’ve had the orange box (I think of it as orange despite the other colours, because orange is the dominant tone outside and inside). I’ve owned several LP storage boxes over the years. Some are still around (I have three in my office at work), others have gone the ways these things go: lost, broken, left behind. For some years (at least ten, probably more), this has been the box I use to hold my newest records. I mean those that I acquire as new releases or new reissues rather than new-to-me secondhand records, which tend to live in a variety of other containers.

The box provides a focus, a reminder that, whatever else I’m drawn to pull from the record shelves on any given day, there is a group of records (typically 20-25 albums) that I want to get to know better. Increasingly, these will be records that I’ve discovered through digital platforms (Qobuz and Bandcamp currently) or have been persuaded to check out from the many and varied recommendations that arrive daily via email and social (+ other) media.

It’s January. As snow settles around the house, I’m putting records away. I’m going through the orange box and deciding which albums from last year to take out and file in the shelves behind (A-L), or upstairs where there are more shelves (L-Z and compilations). One reason I’m doing this is in anticipation of new records. There is already one new LP to go in the box—Jenny on Holiday’s Quicksand Heart, of which more below—and I expect there will be others to come in the next few months.

But I’m not done with 2025 yet. Why would I be? It’s not as if us music fans and writers, having put the finishing touches to our year-end reviews, should just put all thought of them aside and pack away our physical or virtual tracks like so many Christmas baubles.

Those records will continue to entertain, comfort, challenge and inspire. There are those I’ll want to keep in circulation just for the pleasure they bring me. Others are ones I’d have liked to write more about last year and may still have ambitions to write about this year. Like the Robbie Fulks album that peeks out when I release the clasps of the orange box.

I’ve written a little about Fulks here before, recording the effect his 2013 album Gone Away Backward had on me, especially the song ‘That’s Where I’m From’. I want to write more about that song and album, and more about his newest release, with its brilliantly observed reflections on family and ageing. Fulks will stay in the box for now.

What else is in there? A list is in order (but what sort of order? front to back will do):

• Poor Creature, All Smiles Tonight (good to have at least one representative of the constantly intriguing Irish folk scene in the box)

• Panda Bear, Sinister Grift (not done with those harmonies yet)

• Rosalía, Lux (kind of glad I didn’t write an opinion piece on this now, still grateful that it arrived just in time for the Rosalía class I taught last term at Newcastle, still working my way around the confusing, cruciform lyric insert)

• Emma Swift, The Resurrection Game (pleasingly robust LP packaging, and great to have the sublime ‘Oblivion and You’ on vinyl for winter listening sessions)

• Big Thief, Double Infinity (I wanted to write about numbers, infinities, ageing: perhaps I still will)

• Jerskin Fendrix, Once Upon a Time … in Shropshire (nowhere near finished with this, even temporarily)

• CMAT, Euro-Country

• Blood Orange, Essex Honey

• Dave, The Boy Who Played the Harp

• Jim Ghedi, Wasteland

• Jim Legxacy, Black British Music (neighbouring Jims, each with compelling takes on British culture)

• Robert Forster, Strawberries

• V/A, Sand Worms: The Songs of Howe Gelb and Giant Sand (I have to write about GS/HG one of these days)

• The Cosmic Tones Research Trio’s self-titled second album

• Park Jiha, All Living Things (just as Masayoshi Fujita’s 2024 album Migratory continued to reside in the orange box for months last year, I can sense Park’s doing the same. It falls into several categories I hold dear: a concept album about space, place and the natural world around us; aspects of ambient music and Korean folk, with some of Park’s earlier jazz-informed music still shimmering in the background; an exploration of temporality, seasons and cycles through musical motifs that use repetition, silence and texture.)

• Molly Tuttle, So Long Little Miss Sunshine

• Jason Isbell, Foxes in the Snow (I hadn’t realised that what I needed from Jason Isbell was a solo album of acoustic guitar-based songs, but it made sense. As much as I’ve enjoyed the singer-songwriter’s string of band releases, and as much as I appreciate Isbell stretching out for lengthy electric solos with his fellow guitarists, I’ve felt some distance from the songs in recent years. This album brought the intimacy back.)

• Little Simz, Lotus

• Lonnie Holley, Tonky (too new at the time to feature prominently in my Holley essay, but an affirmation of all I hold dear in his art)

• Rich(ard) Dawson, End of the Middle (of course I’ll continue to write about Dawson)

• Bonnie Prince Billy, The Purple Bird (how a lot of the first third of 2025 sounded to me; this will give way to a new BPB album in March)

• FKA twigs, Eusexua (odd to see this on sale in Newcastle department store Fenwick last year when they were capitalising on the city’s hosting of the Mercury Music Prize. My copy didn’t come from there, but from the twigs store; I got caught up in the buzz of the limited edition and its extra goodies)

• Bog Summoner, The Cube of Unknowing

Bog Summoner is at the back. Time to file this album that never quite made it to my most-played last year, though I do like its cover, concept and gradually building kosmische vibe. An album that rewards concentrated listening. One more play before it goes on the shelves. I particularly enjoy ‘Breeder of Enchantments’.

The others will stay for now as I only need to make space for one new record so far this year.

Jenny On Holiday - Quicksand Heart

I became a fan of Let’s Eat Grandma, the duo of then-sixteen-year-old best friends Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton, after buying their debut album I, Gemini on the back of a Simon Reynolds review (The Wire, June 2016). I adored the quirky ‘experimental sludge pop’ (their description) and schoolgirl psychedelia. When they showed, first with 2018’s I’m All Ears and then with 2022’s Two Ribbons, that they could also fashion the kind of pop hooks that should have seen them topping charts, I was totally smitten.

Those last two albums have been on regular rotation in my car for the last few years, while I’m more likely to play the debut on vinyl still. Like many LEG fans, I've often wished there were more music, and I’ve followed side projects and one-offs with interest: LEG’s soundtrack for Half Bad / The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself; Rosa Walton’s ‘I Really Want to Stay at Your House’ written for the Cyberpunk 2077 game; the duo’s contribution to a Nick Drake tribute album (the finest cover on the album for my money).

The announcement last year that Hollingworth would be releasing new work as Jenny on Holiday came as welcome news. Three singles subsequently appeared, followed a week ago by the album Quicksand Heart. Over the last seven days, these songs have got their typically barbed hooks into me as I’ve played the record and taken the Qobuz version on a couple of runs.

My impression is that, though we’ve lost much of the experimentalism that marked out the LEG of a decade ago and clung on in some form as their pop powers grew (at least for I’m All Ears, less so for Two Ribbons), the music still feels like part of an ongoing narrative about how human relationships are mediated through experiences with the nonhuman world, how existing in a world of nonhuman things and systems can feel like a safe space from the messiness of interpersonal relationships. There may be no ‘Eat Shiitake Mushrooms’ or ‘Donnie Darko’ here, but there are wished encounters with animals and landscapes, metaphors of growth, nurturing and intimacy. There’s feeling frozen for so long and being scared of thawing out, of what it might mean to give yourself to someone or something again.

In terms of popcraft, these songs are as catchy as any Hollingworth and Walton have produced, full of tiered builds, punchy setups, breaks and drops. Jenny’s voice soars, seduces and sags. Vulnerability assumes the form of a voice that shifts from anonymous perfection to something closer to speech, and a concise lyricism that ties 21C pop to everyday conversation.

From ‘Every Ounce of Me’:

You said darling
And I’m like hardly
And you said sweetie
And I’m like kill me
You call me crazy
And that’s a maybe
But then you held me
And oh, God, help me, no

Repeated listens highlight different approaches to how the songs build, break and drop. The first time the chorus of ‘Push’ comes in, I expect it to be louder, to do that thing that pop and EDM drops do of pushing the hook to the foreground. But it holds back, with the volume coming on the second verse instead. There follows a gradual build, leading to tiered backing vocals before the chorus returns for the third time. It seems apt for a song about pushing and pulling, about positionality, to be asked to reflect the space that voices take up in the mix.

‘Dolphins’

And then there’s ‘Dolphins’, a track that leapt out at me even before I heard it. Was Jenny offering a cover of the Fred Neil song? No, it turned out, she wasn’t. But she has produced a song every bit as affecting for me (and that’s saying a lot: I love Neil’s song: his own recording and the versions I know by Tim Buckley, Eddi Reader and Billy Bragg).

I wanna see dolphins in the ocean tonight
I wanna meet the eyes of something that don’t live a human life
Down by the coast and
It goes on for miles
I wanna see dolphins ...

That appeal to the nonhuman, that same desire for a refuge from the messiness of human life that is frozen into ‘Every Ounce of Me’. And lurking in the background throughout the song, a high keening sound that we’ve come to associate with marine life.

There’s a further appeal for me, and it’s to do with the structuring of the lyrics. The musical pulse of the track is steady and is what we hear first, before any words enter. The bobbing synth suggests a tempo that the lyric then undercuts. The irregular meter of the second line packs extra syllables and contributes to the musicality of the lyric, a wave of ideas and emotions. Then, relative calm again for ‘down by the coast and’ … pause … ‘it goes on for miles’. The repeated ‘I wanna see dolphins’ is both a resolution of the verse and an opening of the chorus. (I see that whoever’s responsible for posting the lyrics to Genius has put that line at the start of the chorus, whereas I’d have started the chorus with ‘And over time’, but that’s just proof of this song’s wonderful porosity).¹

And oh that chorus:

• ‘And over time’—soaring up, carrying us across the imagined deep

• ‘Words don’t suffice’—because they’re clumsy human efforts at capturing experience; as Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington sang to us last year, words are both ‘mere echoes of the world’ and ‘the foundation of the world’: super important, but also not sufficient

• ‘And I feel how I feel / And I need to look out and see them’—to experience the world on its own terms when words won’t suffice

• ‘Soaring high’—still up in the choral ether, with seabirds and whales and dolphins as companions

• ‘Just how this life could be’—the wish at the heart of so many songs

• ‘Could still be’—a genius touch: aching, hopeful

Notes towards a 2026 playlist

I generally get my year-end playlists finished later than many people. But I start early, logging notable tracks as I listen to new releases, laying down waymarkers for an otherwise unplanned route through the year. What remains on them at year-end is not in any manner a stab at an objective ‘best of’, more like a reflection of my listening year subjected to a mixtaper’s rule or two (e.g. only one track per artist/album, what works well as a sequence). Signs to help me navigate my way back through the wilderness of the recent past.

‘Dolphins’ is on my 2026 list and the only reason I can see it coming off at year-end is if I decide to replace it with one of the more uptempo tracks for the ‘catchy’ section I usually place at the start of my lists. Time will tell on that, and also on what records will join Quicksand Heart in the orange box. In the year’s first quarter, I’m anticipating releases by Mary Lattimore & Julianna Barwick (Tragic Magic), Beverly Glenn-Copeland (Laughter in Summer), Hen Ogledd (Discombobulated), Bill Callahan (My Days of 58), Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (We Are Together Again), Robyn (Sexistential). There will be others.

1. No lyrics are provided with the record, so we get to make our own decisions about intended line, verse and chorus breaks, not to mention what counts as pre-chorus, bridge, and so on.