Smerz – ‘Easy’ EP review: blink and you’ll miss it
They say that quality over quantity is the most important thing in music and art in general, and I don’t disagree – except in the case where Smerz are barely there at all.
The Skinny: In many ways, it’s difficult to put a precise finger on the pulse of what the Norwegian electronic duo are trying to achieve. The sounds that Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt create throughout the snapshot course of their latest EP Easy are often so sparse that it’s frankly a challenge to discern anything concrete as a whole.
Of course, there’s no escaping the fact that this is, at least partly, the entire point. They released their last album, Big City Life, only in May 2025, with the release of the new EP lining up almost to the day with the record’s one-year anniversary. It was clearly planned to be different and abstract, but you have to ask: at what stage does this just give way into nothing?
Taking into account the six-track span of the EP, which subsequently clocks in at just over nine minutes in length, it’s an evident facet of the design structure that it is meant to be fleeting and somewhat disarming compared to what has come before. There’s no high-stakes production here – the opening track, ‘Somewhere 1’, is simply the notes of a later riff repeated between gaps of silence.
In this sense, there are limited options when it comes to what could be constituted as actual songs. The single ‘Spring Summer’ could definitely be classed as one example, with hazy synths lazily dotted over a two-minute track accompanied by a simple vocal. It’s less the mood of being in the club, and more the disoriented state you find yourself in as you leave, while the sun is coming up, and the pounding beats still thumping in your ears.
A largely similar analysis can be applied to the song ‘It’s Here’, which lyrically questions “Am I slowly fading into something real?” over a sporadic course of beats and notes that don’t seem to provide much guidance, other than to flesh the EP out a bit more. Put bluntly, the effort is really a course of three sparse songs with flat demos spliced in between – it leaves you very little to go on.
Things do improve briefly in the form of the closing track ‘The Room You Described’ (and I do mean ‘briefly’ in the most literal sense of the word; it’s only a minute-and-a-half long). You can’t claim that the production is fuller than any other point, but the ethereal shared vocals from the pair do seem to provide a sense of clarity that hasn’t been apparent before, if only through the language of obsolete electronic beat.
Yet on the whole, Easy seems to exist only for the reason of putting something out in the world. It’s an EP of snapshots, offshoots, demos, and threads of ideas that end up trailing to nowhere. If you lap up everything Smerz does by the note, then knock yourself out and enjoy it. But for everyone else, it honestly amounts to nothing.
Standout Track: ‘The Room You Describe’
The Verdict: In essence, Easy seems to be what it says on the tin – it doesn’t buzz with any real purpose, and lacks any substantial signs of effort. Perhaps that’s the failing of an untrained ear into the true nuances of deep-seated electronica, but I don’t feel like that’s the case here. It’s sparse and solitary, and probably better left behind.
Release Date: May 15th, 2026 | Producer: Smerz | Label: Escho
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