![]() “It’s a celebration of individualism at all costs. ‘A message to myself’ is a reminder to keep doing you,” says Murray. One of pop’s more unsuspecting stars, Murray takes his observational and deeply personal songwriting to disarmingly candid heights, right from the album’s chaotic opener, ‘a message to myself.’ A symphonic essay on depression and a rallying call for self-love, the track was produced alongside Grammy-nominated Bekon (known for his work on Kendrick Lamar’s ‘DAMN’ and BJ The Chicago Kid’s ‘In My Mind’) and arrives alongside a brilliant video directed and animated by Andy Baker (a collaborator on Adult Swim’s ‘Rick and Morty’). As GQ wrote when profiling the band, “imagine what would happen if Alex Turner, Kaytranada and Loyle Carner collaborated, and you’ll get something fairly close to Easy Life’s indefinable sound.” Here is a band, then, formed for the collective escape from the everyday experience, a world built out of chip wrappers, late nights and finding yourself - if even for a moment - stupidly happy.īeneath its sun-kissed and at times gloriously odd sound, ‘life’s a beach’ also shows how much more there is to easy life than their apparent musical confidence. easy life’s simple, existential mantra is about finding the fun by whatever means necessary (even in a pandemic). It’s burnt British skin on a Spanish Costa, a cheeky garage weekender in Aya Napa and swimming trunks that sag in the all the wrong places. It’s Margate and Morecombe, the postcard imagery of Martin Parr, the swimming pool of Sexy Beast. The beach of ‘life’s a beach’ is not a Caribbean hideaway. Or as Murray sums it up, “it’s a record that wishes it was anywhere else but here, yet at the same time fixates on a dreary middle England existence.” A title that makes total sense, argues Murray, when you’re “from slap bang in the middle of the country, geographically as far from the nearest seaside as possible.” Like all things that sound crafted on the hoof, a lot of love (and pain) goes into making easy life sound as easy as they do. ![]() Their effortlessly accomplished mixtapes - ‘creature habits’, ‘spaceships’, and the top-10-charting ‘junk food’ (which featured their only duet to date, with Arlo Parks) - have led the rascal band of brothers to debut album, ‘life’s a beach’. Since 2017, easy life have paved their own way via a catalogue bursting with introspective, escapist, outsider-anthems. Perhaps it should be rephrased as working at one’s own pace. Idleness, on this occasion, comes with its own caveats. This record is born out of the productivity of idleness.” In its own unassuming way, it also marks easy life’s graduation into the UK’s definitive young band. ![]() “I could totally relate to what he was saying. ![]() ![]() Up the M6, it was Mancunian bard John Cooper Clarke who suggested - paraphrases Murray - “it was his idleness that made him so good.” Turning the parochial majestic, and finding the sublime in the mundane, is a philosophy entwined with easy life’s, and proved something of a eureka-moment for Murray when distractedly contemplating the band’s own debut album. It seemed to speak to the DNA of easy life: a band born in the Midlands, with frontman Murray growing up on a farm in Loughborough, and his bandmates Oliver Cassidy (drums), Sam Hewitt (bass), Lewis Alexander Berry (guitar) and Jordan Birtles (keyboards/percussion) on either side of him in Leicester and Nottingham. Somewhere in the middle of 2020, Murray Matravers heard a pocket of wisdom on the radio. ![]()
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