Back in November, the English synth-pop duo Let’s Eat Grandma announced their third album, Two Ribbons. With that announcement, Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth also shared the album’s track list, which featured an opening track called “Happy New Year.” And now that we’ve entered the New Year, the duo isn’t missing the perfect opportunity to ring in 2022 by releasing “Happy New Year” as a single. Following previous singles “Hall of Mirrors” and “Two Ribbons,” “Happy New Year” is the album’s best example yet of Let’s Eat Grandma’s explosive pop, centering a constellation of synthesizers in the chorus that recalls fireworks — before featuring actual fireworks toward the end of the song. The video stars Walton and Hollingworth playing tennis and then celebrating the New Year with those fireworks and some popped bottles.
The song takes inspiration from the rift in Walton and Hollingworth’s friendship that preceded Two Ribbons. “I’d been struggling to come to terms with the fact that our relationship had changed, but as the song and time progresses I come to accept that it couldn’t stay the way it was when we were kids forever, and start to view it as a positive thing — because now we have been able to grow into our own individual selves,” Walton said in a statement. (“I said, ‘I don’t know how we do it’ / And you said, ‘Just think if we’d have been together / we’d be breaking up,’” goes part of the first verse.) Two Ribbons follows the duo’s breakout 2018 album, I’m All Ears, and will be released on April 8.
