Let’s Eat Grandma, Electrowerkz, London - live review: Experimental pop about dead cats, Donnie Darko, baking chocolate cakes and Rapunzel

Of all the hyped bands you’ll hear in 2016, Let’s Eat Grandma are undoubtedly the most compelling proposition

Twin-a-likes: childhood friends Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth make up the duo Let's Eat Grandma

Of all the hyped bands you’ll hear in 2016, Let’s Eat Grandma are undoubtedly the most compelling proposition. Two near-identical 17-year-old girls from Norwich obsessed with tree houses, horror films and the recorder; making wraithlike, experimental pop about dead cats, Donnie Darko, baking chocolate cakes and Rapunzel? It certainly puts Blossoms in the shade.

Friends since the age of four, Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth have been making music since they were 13 and the bond is evident: the pair have created their own, self-contained world on forthcoming debut album, I, Gemini, a record which stands alone – unlike anything you’ll hear this year. A patchwork of ideas woven together with childlike abandon, it’s bewitching yet fun, marrying raps about getting “bubblegum stuck to their trainers” with glockenspiel solos, saxophone intros and playground chants – as if their school was run by Kate Bush on The Wicker Man’s Summerisle.

The strangeness extends to their live show. If the glacial, gothic nature of their music wasn’t eerie enough, Let’s Eat Grandma’s presence adds to the unease. As soon as the pair step onto the stage bathed in dark-blue light, with their long sweeping hair evident in silhouette form, there is more than a touch of the girls from The Shining about them as they stare vacantly into the distance, a feeling which is exacerbated when they turn to pat-a-cake handclap each other. As opener “Deep Six Textbook” creeps along ominously at a funeral march pace, they eventually turn to their keyboards to sing helium-high harmonies, as the song drifts for six enchanting minutes.

The set follows in a similar vein, with poker-faced dance moves injecting an innocence that borders on the sinister – a deliberate juxtaposition from girls who love playing with people’s perceptions of who they are, and seem not to know, or even care, there’s an audience present. When the music comes together, as it does on the woozy, synthy “Sink” and the closing “Donnie Darko”, an ambitious, multi-faceted track taking in The xx-style guitars and sweeping organ sounds, the results are breathtaking.

To be expected, there were also missteps. Technical issues hit album highlight “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms” and not all of their ideas stick: save a rattle of noise midway through, “Chocolate Sludge Cake” is undercooked, meandering aimlessly and tunelessly for far too long. But this was a captivating show from a band whose potential is undoubted.