Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton first bonded over a turquoise and orange snail. The pair were drawing at a table in their kindergarten class, where Hollingworth was working hard on her technicolor creature. Impressed, Walton peered over and said, “Hi, do you want to be my friend?” Recalling this story, the teenagers of Let’s Eat Grandma share a private look. “Rosa’s always admired my art,” Hollingworth adds, with a pseudo-modest flourish of the wrist. A moment passes before the pair explode into laughter. “From the beginning,” Walton earnestly concurs, “Jenny’s been a creative genius.”

It’s a February afternoon in Norwich, a cozy city in the east of England, and Let’s Eat Grandma are unfurling their origin story in the upstairs enclosure of a local vegan café. Hollingworth, who began the conversation cocooned away in a puffy green jacket, quickly becomes the focal point, holding forth on such topics as celebrity feminism and online clique-forming, as Walton gazes out the window. This rhythm persists until, quizzed on a knotty chapter of band history, the pair will perk up and synchronize, primed to elaborate and clarify in wide-eyed bursts.

These childhood friends have a firm clasp on their sprawling pop band’s narrative, from their early days plotting local shows at age 13 through the release, three years later, of an original and darkly alluring debut album called I, Gemini. By turns solemn and playful, that record stitched together screams, kazoos, and incantatory monologues, as if an unruly teen-girl squad had been stranded, Lord of the Flies-style, in a remote music class, then self-organized and declared sovereignty.

But I, Gemini was written four years ago—an eon in teenage time. They’re now 18 and 19, and their forthcoming second LP, I’m All Ears, is a staggering reinvention. The new record’s most radical departure is the recent single “Hot Pink,” written and recorded with experimental pop producer SOPHIE as well as Faris Badwan of the shadowy indie-pop group the Horrors. But the whole thing is full of hairpin turns, veering from the pop intricacies of Lorde and the xx to sweeping prog, sometimes within the same eight-minute-plus song. It marks an extraordinary progression, especially coming from Norwich’s unassuming music scene.

Let’s Eat Grandma: “Hot Pink” (via SoundCloud)

After finding common ground in kindergarten, the young friends grew up in tandem, often in worlds of their own invention. When they were 10, they composed a jazz-funk song about the travails of epic boredom, using percussion their parents had picked up while travelling the world: maracas, bells, a rain stick. At 13, they set up a rehearsal room in Walton’s loft, where they wrote songs on a new guitar bought for her birthday. “Every time my parents had someone stay, we had to move the drum kit,” Walton says, chuckling. Within a year, they were booking their own gigs around Norwich.

Following Walton’s gaze out the window, you can see the block that houses Access Norwich, a creative center where the duo studied after leaving high school at 16. The school offers music-themed classes in composition, history, and business to people outside the traditional education system. (Alums include Ed Sheeran.) It’s a valuable service in Norwich, which attracts the anachronistic and bookish; until recently, this modestly populated city had the UK’s most frequented library. The region is somewhat remote, tucked in an eastern crevice hours off the motorways—“not somewhere you can end up by accident,” goes a local cliché. Anyone left out of its small, self-contained scenes tends to gravitate toward London, a two-hour train away. But Access Norwich corrals those who haven’t yet escaped, and fosters an informal network through which more artists might grow local roots.