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.
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 center of gravity here. Around it: synthesizers, programmed rhythm, guitars, layered vocals, electronic textures and the occasional bit of machinery behaving as though it has developed its own opinion about the song it's become a part of.
The songs wander through dream pop, indietronica, trip-hop, new wave, art rock and more cinematic territory. Now settles into a darker downtempo pocket. Stars Are What You’re Made Of leans toward electronic groove and art-pop. The Me You See Now lives somewhere more shadowed and cinematic. Spirit Eyes and Summer move between dreamier atmospheres and rhythmic propulsion.
The common threads are melody, electronic production, layered vocals, synth and MIDI architecture, and guitars that still carry a little post-punk dust on their boots.
Hear the singles
Start with these two songs from the album:
Track List:
- Spirit Eyes
- The Me You See Now
- Magick
- Now
- Summer
- 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.
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.