Label: Island Records
Released: 28th May 2021
When we first put Easy Life on the cover of Dork, back in March of 2020, they looked set up for a barnstorming year. There were big live dates on the books. There was an expectation of a much-anticipated debut album. There was even a good chance of those awards, plaudits and end of year list mentions aplenty that might follow. And then the world stopped.
Momentum wound down; it’d be easy to suggest that the Midlands massive might have missed their moment. But they haven’t. Easy Life have always seemed like a band operating on their own effortless steam. While urgency may have been forced upon them by the gears and cogs of an industry around them, musically they’ve remained the calm at the eye of the storm, laid back with an umbrella-adorned cocktail in hand. After a year of frantic panic, worry and claustrophobic stress, ‘life’s a beach’ isn’t an opportunity passed.
Rarely moving out of a horizontal state, it’s an album for hazy sun and lazy, wavy days. Opener ‘a message to myself’ might have seemed an odd choice for a lead track, but in context, it’s an effective curtain-raiser on a record that finds fertile ground in the everyday. A raw and honest call for self-care; it’s followed by the anxious megabop ‘skeletons’, kitchen-sink love story ‘daydreams’ and uplifting, posi-vibes-anthem ‘have a great day’. It’s closer ‘music to walk home to’ that really mixes up the formula, though. A Mike Skinner-esque stream of consciousness, it’s all snatched conversations, casual musings and flashes of thoughts. Unlike anything we’ve heard from the band before, it’s the sharpest distillation of the everyday existence that drives Easy Life yet.
Delving into the full emotional spectrum, ‘life’s a beach’ is an album that might sound dreamy, but underneath the surface those waters run deep. A moment of escape from muddled, muddling lives, it’s the perfect balm to soothe us out the other side, back into the mundanity of modern life.
