Rosa Walton breaks out of Let’s Eat Grandma’s shadow

Rosa Walton’s solo album Tell Me It’s a Dream charts a year-round craft: songs shaped by seasons, reworked from synth-pop into guitar-forward pieces, and brought to life through a close-knit studio circle with David Wrench and her Let’s Eat Grandma partner Jen

The first thing you hear on Rosa Walton’s Tell Me It’s a Dream is her insistence on feeling—light. bright. sometimes glassy. but never distant. On one track. she sings. “Oh. you and me/ We breathe everything in. ” and the lyric lands like a small door opening. This isn’t a detour from her day job as one half of Let’s Eat Grandma. It’s what happens when Walton decides the band can be a reference point, not a cage.

Walton. a 26-year-old musician. is best known as one half of Let’s Eat Grandma. the art-pop project she’s helmed alongside Jenny Hollingworth since they were teenagers. This year, both have released solo albums. The first MISRYOUM Artist Spotlight of 2026 was with Hollingworth, whose solo record is titled Jenny on Holiday. Walton’s album title carries its own kind of echo: Tell Me It’s a Dream.

The alchemy between their records is audible before you even reach Walton’s own lines. On Jenny on Holiday’s Quicksand Heart. Walton is featured. and later she returns the favor on ‘Prettier Things’. singing “Oh. you and me/ We breathe everything in.” Even the way she talks about it feels careful. She didn’t just invite Jenny in—Walton described it as intentional. tied to the song’s subject and the shared world they’ve built together.

Seasons are the spine of Walton’s songwriting on this record. “There’s something kind of bursting inside of me that feels like a summer just begun. ” she said. pointing to how the time of release makes her think of the line. She’s hugely affected by seasons when she writes, she explained, with different songs tied to different weather. ‘Wave Machine’ is “hugely a summer song. ” written in the summer. meant to capture the sense of being on the beach with everything feeling endless. ‘Taking the Roof Down’ is the winter counterpart. a Christmas song—“so that’s a winter song.” ‘Sorry Anyway’ is spring. too. For Walton, seasons cut to the core of feelings even when they aren’t stated outright.

Christmas, in particular, isn’t treated like holiday wallpaper. Walton said she likes the build-up—Christmas lights, the atmosphere—more than the day itself. The metaphor shows up across the record’s emotional geography: ‘Taking the Roof Down’ uses Christmas as a way to capture the warmth she remembers “when you’re a kid. ” with the excitement and spark of Christmas coming. In ‘Halfway Round the World’. she sings “a spark from all the Christmases. ” describing it as the feeling of family and warmth. including the excitement of getting out of bed on Christmas Day as a child. And she made the connection to Let’s Eat Grandma’s wider New Year themes through discussions with Jenny about the relationship between home and the holiday season—home as the place you build your dreams.

Those conversations about home keep surfacing, but Walton also admits the record isn’t built around returning. “Going home isn’t a huge theme of this record. ” she said. which made it harder to answer what the feeling is now. What she returns to instead is reset and memory. She described it as the ability to step out of your life and reset. and added that certain places bring memories back so intensely it’s almost like she’s inside them. In her account, music is one of the strongest triggers—listening can pull her into the scene.

The way Tell Me It’s a Dream is made is just as deliberate. Walton credits the record’s reach to collaboration rather than isolation. even though she describes the early songwriting as sometimes beginning in solitude. Some songs started with Sam E. Yamaha, with a lot of them initially conceived as synth-pop. Walton then developed them by herself—rewriting vocals and lyrics—before reworking them into guitar songs. A few others she wrote by herself from the start.

Her band work matters too. Walton co-produced the album with David Wrench, who she described as a close friend and longtime collaborator. Wrench worked on the last two Let’s Eat Grandma records. and Walton said she couldn’t imagine working with anyone else. partly because she feels comfortable enough to be “exactly the way I am” in his studio. She also worked with a band that included guitarist John Victor, bassist Kam Khan, and drummer Elena Costa.

“Me and Jenny are best friends. and we do everything together. ” Walton said. and she pushed back on the idea that their closeness doesn’t translate into the solo era. For Tell Me It’s a Dream, she brought Jenny into a song she felt demanded her voice. With ‘Prettier Things’. Walton said it’s about “me and Jenny. ” like dragonflies flying around in a magical garden they discovered together. Jenny’s vocals “weave in” with Walton’s. adding “a whole other element.” Walton described going to many of Jenny’s studio sessions as well—sometimes simply hanging out on the sofa. offering suggestions without interfering.

The studio choices on Tell Me It’s a Dream extend to how Walton shaped the record’s sound. She described tracking bass, drums, and guitar all together, then adding extra bits from earlier demos. She also said she wrote the strings on ‘Halfway Round the World’ in the demo already. along with choirs and organs. For other sounds. the approach was more selective: she wanted to “strip it back to only having parts that were completely necessary. ” so songs could hold up at their core as guitar pieces rather than relying on production to carry them.

Walton also talked about sequencing, but in a way that makes it clear it’s more instinct than gimmick. She said she always does sequencing at the end and doesn’t put much thought into it—she simply felt the songs belonged in that order. Even her idea of the album’s emotional arc is tied to structure: guitar songs dominate the first half. while it gradually becomes more ethereal. with ‘When Will It All Reveal’ leaning into electronics and ‘Halfway Round the World’ moving through strings.

One of Walton’s sharpest shifts is in her relationship with her voice. She believes the record expanded what she can do. and she linked that change to practicing because she needed to sing live melodies she wrote that were “pretty high.” Singing becomes a different task when she’s the only vocalist on a solo project; it’s “the voice. ” she said. and she now prepares for live performances as carefully as she writes.

“I really enjoy doing my scales every morning,” she added. She said she decided to start recently. not as a lifelong habit: she never rehearsed before in her life until now. never practiced guitar. and didn’t know how to improve her voice. For a gig. she googled “how to sing” and learned about breathing from the stomach—“from low down”—which she now does. It changed the game, she said, and made singing easier.

That physical confidence feeds back into what songs feel like to perform. Walton said she likes singing ‘Wave Machine’ at the moment because it contains “so many different feelings in that song at once.” And there’s at least one track that has shifted in meaning as time passed: ‘Halfway Round the World’. She called it timeless and nostalgic. and now finds it interesting to sing because she feels it remains true to herself. connecting to the feeling in different ways. The song was written during a time when she was on tour. and two band members—Elena Costa and Kam Khan—were on that tour as well. making the track’s present-tense performance especially close. Walton said that three years later, they’ll be playing it with her in upcoming shows.

Tell Me It’s a Dream is out now via Trasgressive.

And what stays with you is the human shape of her choices: the way she protects her ethereal side without letting it drift away from guitars; the way she makes room for Jenny’s voice without turning her solo record into a duet; the way she leans into seasons because they match how feelings arrive—sudden. specific. and already in motion.

Rosa Walton Tell Me It’s a Dream Let’s Eat Grandma Jenny Hollingworth Jenny on Holiday David Wrench Trasgressive art-pop indie music music interview