Persephone’s Picnic — OUT NOW
Dutch Holly’s nine-track album is out now — released October 14, 2026. Get the complete 320 kbps MP3 album directly from Dutch Holly for $9.99.
A Note on Artificial Intelligence
No artificial intelligence was used in the creation or production of Persephone’s Picnic.
Available here first. Streaming services will follow on a later date. Join us for the October 17 album release party.
Dutch Holly · 2026
Persephone’s Picnic · Full Album Player
The sound of the album
Electronic indie pop is the foundation of Persephone's Picnic, but it's hardly the boundary. Across nine songs, Dutch Holly combines melodic alternative-pop songwriting with vintage synthesizers, programmed rhythms, live instrumentation, post-punk guitars, and richly layered vocals. The music travels through dream pop, synthpop, new wave, psychedelic alternative pop, electronic rock, and the occasional excursion into progressive territory.
At the album's pop-oriented end, Spirit Eyes layers cinematic dream-pop synthesizers, shimmering guitars and a sophisticated harmonic structure over a neo-disco groove. Stars Are What You're Made Of ventures into retro-futuristic Space Disco, while Let the Light In channels the exuberance of 1980s dance-pop through vintage drum machines, vocoders and unconventional electronic textures.
Elsewhere, things get considerably stranger.
The Me You See Now combines jungle breakbeats, darkwave atmosphere and disorienting vocal effects. Magick conjures a gothic landscape of ghostly voices, hard-edged guitars, electronic percussion and supernatural imagery. Now builds a cinematic, Southwestern psychedelic soundscape from downtempo rhythms, warped piano, haunting guitars and an unlikely collection of instruments.
Phoenix translates desert heat and personal reinvention into woozy synthesizers, psychedelic delays and driving post-punk guitars. The six-minute Summer reaches toward progressive psychedelic pop, with soaring harmonies, adventurous Moog synthesizers and shifting rock and dance grooves. And Funny Girl (11th Anniversary Edition) brings the album's new-wave and alternative-rock influences into sharp focus with aggressive chorused guitars, pulsing synth bass and an anthemic refrain.
The songs may occupy different musical worlds, but they share a common language: memorable melodies, unconventional electronic production, expressive guitars, layered voices and a willingness to follow an arrangement wherever it leads.
The theme of transformation runs throughout Persephone's Picnic, and surfaces as both musical process and recurring lyrical expressions. Sounds mutate, identities shift, darkness gives way to light, and familiar forms become something unexpected.
Nine songs, many worlds, one journey through the space between who we are and who we might become.
Hear the singles
Start with these two advance singles from the album:
Track List:
Go behind the music in Inside Persephone’s Picnic: Nine Songs, Nine Worlds, our track-by-track look at the recordings.
- Spirit Eyes
- The Me You See Now
- Magick
- Now
- Summer — watch the live performance
- Let the Light In
- Phoenix
- Stars Are What You're Made Of
- Funny Girl (11th Anniversary Edition)
Why "Persephone's Picnic?"
The title comes from Persephone’s descent into the Underworld and, especially, the pomegranate seeds she eats there.
In the myth, the snack has consequences. Eating the food of the Underworld binds Persephone to that realm. The pomegranate carries deep meaning and symbolism: hospitality accepted, a contract entered, marriage and union, fertility and mortality, the agricultural cycle, winter and return.
Persephone changes with the crossing. Kore, the maiden associated with flowers and spring, becomes Persephone, Queen of the Underworld—a figure who belongs to both worlds and moves between them.
That tension runs through the album: transformation, divided identities, darkness and illumination, departure and return, and the ways an experience can change the person who comes back from it. The songs move between worlds like our real life experiences.
Decoding the Sigil
Tap a part of the Sigil to reveal its meaning.
Hover on desktop.
The sigil explained
Three symbols comprise the Sigil.
Choose the top, middle or bottom part of the Sigil to see how each piece connects to the mythology of Persephone’s Picnic.
01 · Above
Pluto · The Underworld
The astrological symbol for Pluto. Pluto is the Roman counterpart of Hades, Greek god of the Underworld and Persephone’s captor in the story of her descent and return.
02 · The center
Six Pomegranate Seeds
Six seeds represent the food of the Underworld. By eating them, Persephone is forever bound to return to the Underworld for half the year. Notice half point up, and half point downward, evoking the cycle of her descent and return.
03 · Below
Eclipse
The eclipse represents the interplay between light and shadow. Persephone is a goddess of balance. She exists in the light and the dark, life and death, beginnings and endings. Her story bridges the gap between opposites, revealing the interconnectedness of all things.
The Persephone Protocol
Somewhere along the way, the mythology behind the album leaked into the Dutch Holly sci-fi universe.
This seemed like a perfectly reasonable excuse to make a three-episode serial.
The Persephone Protocol follows Jen’s return to the Underworld at Hades' ridiculous insistence, and Tres’s increasingly complicated attempts to help her get back to the Right-Side-Up. Commander Ivy has Galactic-level intel on the situation, and of course, marching orders. The Merchant Tapes interdimensional waypoint is open for business and store associates ALLHAILPAN and Erin P. help with the rescue operation. Storyteller Meg Bohrman comes in clutch with considerably older intelligence about descent, return, and what it takes to bring somebody home from the Underworld.
These three episodes led up to Persephone’s Picnic and the October 17 album release party:
Episode 1 — The Ruler Below
Episode 2 — The Merchant Frequency
Episode 3 — The Song of Return
Making Persephone's Picnic
Persephone's Picnic was written, arranged, recorded, mixed, mastered and self-produced by Jen Juniper and Tres Ikner, with one special guest contribution.
Album credits
Jen Juniper — all lead vocals; songwriting, arranging and production, with substantial creative input on MIDI and drum programming.
Tres Ikner — all electric guitars, bass guitars, keyboards and synthesizers; backing vocals; all MIDI and drum programming, with Jen's creative input; songwriting, arranging and production.
Special guest: Fen Ikner (Tres's brother, of the band Lips) — live drums on Magick, performed and recorded by Fen.
Production location: The Juniperium Forest Command Center, Prescott, Arizona.
In early 2017, we stepped away from performing live as a looping duo.
We had spent several years building shows around a menagerie of instruments + a looper multiplied by real-time arrangements. It was intricate, occasionally heroic, and it was really placing constraints on the music we wanted to play. Some of our songs simply weren’t being performed because making them behave inside the looping setup was more trouble than we could reasonably go to at a gig: You only get so much setup time.
So we stopped booking shows for a while and looked toward the horizon.
Working in the studio changed the considerations. We stopped asking Can we pull this off with the looper? That freed us up to ask instead: What should this song actually sound like?
Game changer.
After a couple of years of experimenting without the old live-looping constraints, Magick and The Me You See Now began to emerge.
Let the Light In, Now, and Stars Are What You’re Made Of followed. Beats, programmed parts, synthesizers, guitars and production ideas could go wherever they wanted. We had become an indie electronic recording artist, and eventually the live show had to catch up.
So we rebuilt it.
The recordings became the blueprint and the live system learned how to translate them to live audiences. Then, the traffic started moving both ways. By 2024, we were hauling these songs around the Southwest, playing them for audiences, tinkering with arrangements, changing sounds, adding textures, finding out where the tunes wanted to go next.
They kept evolving.
Persephone’s Picnic captures that long studio → stage → studio loop (so to speak) and presents the songs in their current 2026 state.
Persephone Picnic Merch
Dutch Holly · Made to order
Bring a Little Underworld Home
The music isn't the only thing coming back from the Underworld. Our Persephone's Picnic collection puts the Persephone's Picnic sigil on shirts, totes, caps, phone cases, magnets and more. Explore the designs in our print-on-demand Dashery shop, where each piece is made to order.
Shop Persephone's Picnic Merch ↗
Merch purchases take place in the Dutch Holly Dashery store, separately from the album download. Styles and availability may vary.