Smerz: Easy EP

"The best Smerz songs saunter by like a hostess maneuvering through the chicest soiree in town: by the time you catch her eye, she's already off to a new room. Fleeting moments are the fascia of the Norwegian duo's enigmatic post-pop; brevity is both the medium and message."

"Their beguiling new EP, Easy, uses the track of the same name as a jumping-off point to explore snapshots of life at the precipice of womanhood. Stoltenberg and bandmate Henriette Motzfeldt bill the EP as a "tangent" building off "Easy," which doesn't appear on the tracklist but hangs in the air across these six songs."

"Here, they forgo plot for feeling in its most archaic form-placeless, shapeless, and sometimes too big to name-continuing to hone what Smerz does best: channel the oxymoronic sensation of wishing an instant would last forever. The langurous pacing of the EP belies the nervier centers within these songs, knotted with stolen glances, unspoken sweet nothings, and a ticking clock."

"Where Big city life sometimes played as a bildungsroman, trailing its protagonists across blurry late nights and intimate early mornings that populate a life before annual reviews and 401ks, Easy evades straightforward storytelling to end up somewhere smudgier and stranger. Intro "Somewhere" may as well be a sense memory: without crossing the minute mark, it sprinkles errant keyboard inversions across a Foley artist's morning to-do list: squeaking doors, rustling footsteps, cleared throats."

Smerz songs move quickly, treating brief moments as both form and meaning. The EP Easy uses its title track as a starting point while presenting six songs that focus on snapshots of life at the threshold of womanhood. The duo frames Easy as a tangent that builds from a concept rather than a direct continuation, keeping “Easy” present in mood even when absent from the tracklist. Instead of plot, the EP emphasizes archaic feeling: placeless, shapeless, and difficult to name. Langurous pacing contrasts with nervous centers filled with stolen glances, unspoken words, and a sense of time running out. The result avoids straightforward storytelling and leans into smudgier, stranger atmospheres.

Read at Pitchfork