Easy Life’s new mixtape ‘Junk Food’ is a tasty feast of Brit-pop, hip hop and R&B
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15.01.2020

Easy Life’s new mixtape ‘Junk Food’ is a tasty feast of Brit-pop, hip hop and R&B

Words by Jakeb Smith

Optimistic in a dying world.

They might be singing about romantic yearning, obsessions with death and celebrity, and the very destruction of our planet, but Leicester quintet Easy Life bring a stoic hopefulness to their made-for-playlists mix of Brit-pop, hip hop and R&B on Junk Food.

Twisted samples play over a lethargic funk beat on opener ‘7 Magpies’, with jazzy guitar chords setting the stage for frontman Murray Matravers’ intimate croon. ‘Nice Guys’ ups the ante (and the tempo), with a disco rhythm, a noodling bass line and delayed guitar swells seemingly pulled from another cosmos. 

‘Dead Celebrities’ stands out as a catchy trip-hop comedown anthem, replete with vintage vinyl crackle and glossy keyboards, and sporting a chorus that takes off like a 747 destined for sold-out festival singalongs. Matravers swoons, with half-dead heroin chic: “Riding with models in the back of a cop car/Jump in the pool from the roof of a five-star/And one day I could be/A distant memory.” 

The track is accompanied by the same lock-jaw grin of rehearsed optimism that pervades the rest of the record. In this sense, Junk Food is perhaps the perfect start to 2020. The world might suck right now, but that doesn’t mean we can’t look forward to tomorrow.

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