Despite not yet reaching her 30s, Rosa Walton could easily be classed an industry veteran. She formed Let’s Eat Grandma with her best friend Jenny Hollingworth when she was just 13 years old, and over the course of six years they released three albums of experimental, kaleidoscopic art-pop. Following their most recent album, 2022’s superb Two Ribbons, the duo put the band on an extended hiatus in order to explore solo careers.

Hollingworth was first out of the traps back in January, with her project Jenny’s On Holiday, and now it’s Walton’s turn. Working with producer David Wrench (the man behind the decks for albums by Arlo Parks and Sampha amongst others), it’s immediately clear that Walton’s decided to swap her band’s experimental side for a more pure pop vision. When she hits form, it’s some of the best pure pop music you’ll hear all year.

Opener Hard To Heartbreak is a prime example – it’s the sort of song that immediately grabs you in the way that Closer by Tegan and Sara or Untouched by The Veronicas would: a big, vibrant statement of intent with a chorus that reaches out and hugs you. It’s a hell of an introduction to the album, which is only bettered by the following Sorry Anyway, which follows a similar template: jangly guitars, bouncy synths and another killer chorus.

Fans of Let’s Eat Grandma’s brand of off-kilter pop won’t be disappointed though. Walton is a big fan of the alt-pop of the 1980s, and Wave Machine proudly wears its influences on its sleeve, with an intro that nods towards Prefab Sprout or Crowded House before namedropping one of The Cure‘s most commercial songs (“it’s Friday, I guess I’m in love”). It’s an effortlessly uplifting gem of a song.

Halfway Round The World has a winsome acoustic strum to it, that’s reminiscent of The Sundays or Natalie Imbruglia, while Walton even manages to create a Christmas song that sounds good all year round in Taking The Roof Down. It’s a track with sleigh bells, lyrical references to tinsel and trees, and like all good Christmas songs, there’s also a fair degree of melancholy. John Lewis may not be calling to cover it any time soon, but it sounds just as good at the beginning of summer as it will come December.

If the album has a flaw, it’s that a couple of tracks feel somewhat underdeveloped – When Will It All Reveal, at under 90 seconds, is more of an interlude than anything more fully formed, while July’s ambient, hazy atmospherics don’t sit quite right on an album full of irresistible pop hooks. Sometimes too, Walton’s voice isn’t quite strong enough, and she seems to struggle to hit the notes occasionally, but the songwriting carries it through.

Romance Is Dead On makes for a suitably celebratory last track, a song that almost skates along on its own sense of joie de vivre – a lyric like “sometimes baby, we live and we learn, and sometimes we just live” seems to be a mantra worth taking note of. It closes an album that marks out Rosa Walton as a name to be reckoned with, and if Let’s Eat Grandma’s hiatus lasts longer than expected, we’ll still have a steady supply of glorious alt-pop songs for some time to come.