Formed in 2017 in Leicester, Easy Life are part of the no-genre movement, mixing elements of R&B, indie, pop, jazz and hip-hop without thinking too much about it. After having released mixtapes and singles for the past four years, their debut studio album ‘Life’s a Beach’ came out yesterday – May 28th – for Island Records. This body of work tackles upon a vastity of subjects, including anxiety, depression and the difficulty of growing up in a non-gentrified part of the country. The band talked about it in more details to NME.
Frontman Murray Matravers explains how difficult it can be ‘to talk about how you feel, especially if how you feel isn’t very well or very healthy. To have that conversation, you have to put yourself in a very vulnerable place and as blokes, you’re conditioned to not be vulnerable, especially not to your girlfriend or boyfriend. We don’t want to go, ‘Actually, I’m a fucking wreck and cripplingly insecure’ because we think that’s not an attractive quality to have. Everyone feels like they have a lot of shit in their lives but never feel that they can talk about, so it creates this vicious cycle where we know that we should be talking about these problems, but we’re not going to because we think that no one gives a fuck about them.’
Matravers also points out the connection between mental health and the negative impact of social media: young people are ‘constantly confronted with an idealised living of being beautiful and successful. But 99 per cent of people aren’t represented [on these platforms], so it’s no wonder that they feel so terrible because they don’t see themselves achieving anything worthwhile,’ he says. ‘That fucked with me, because I didn’t see a 5’4” farmer boy from Leicester doing anything.’
You can listen to ‘Life’s a Beach’ below.
