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. “Have I said too much?” singer Catharina Stoltenberg wonders on “Easy,” the closer to their transfixing 2025 album Big city life. For all the off-handed pseudo-scene reporting that colors that record, Smerz kept their cards close to their chest at the end, as if the wrong incantation might wreck the spell altogether.
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. If the title didn’t clue you in, conjuring a specific locale isn’t their concern; think of this EP as if Backrooms were a will-they-won’t-they romance.
The more fleshed-out songs on Easy take it slow and steady, rarely surpassing 100 BPM and allowing the duo’s characteristically stoic vocals to slowly cool into verses like magma. Centerpiece “Spring summer 3 beat” plays out like a fraternal twin to “Easy,” mirroring the original track’s splayed-out orchestral trip-hop with new confidence; the lover Stoltenberg hoped to approach is now an immovable object of her affections. “Shouldn’t you be somewhere?” she asks, as if inviting them back to…wherever it is we started. “Its here”—landing like Fiona Apple’s “Valentine” by way of Big city life’s “Dreams”—closes with a revving synth that climaxes in the antithesis of a big-room drop: a return to clipped keys and Motzfeldt’s itinerant hum. The moment captures the same shift into adulthood’s duller corners that Smerz’s lyrics contemplate: “Am I slowly fading into something real?”
Smerz has described the process of writing Easy as a “daily journal,” and from the jump I found myself reminded of Danish writer Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. The series follows a woman reliving the same day hundreds of times over. She recognizes each November 18th by the pattern of sounds she overhears: who passes by her home and when, which objects fall and how. Inherent in the metaphysical question of the book’s plot—“Will I hear and see the same things tomorrow?”—is a more personal one: “Will I be the same person hearing and seeing them?” Easy’s closing track “The room you described” revisits the chord progressions of “Somewhere,” but adds vocals and harmonies, the closest thing to a plot device Smerz employs on the EP. Perhaps that’s the larger function of this little collection: building momentum by returning to old haunts with fresh eyes, not rushing to get ahead. “I got something to tell you,” Stoltenberg starts before pausing: “I don't mind.” Maybe tomorrow.
