LE SSERAFIM’s new album EASY is a duet of pain and swag. Their confidence to proclaim, “If it’s hard then I make it easy,” comes directly from their perseverance and determination (“I could get hurt but keep on walking”), and the pride they show on the track “Smart” (“Just one word I know the rest / I see through and break through”) stands in contrast to the inner pain they expose on the track immediately before it, “Swan Song” (“So many days, so many nights, so many tears”). One line from, “Good Bones,” the opening track—“We’re all gonna die eventually and half of our life will be in pain / The other half depends on what we do”—encapsulates the attitude of the whole album: Pain is inevitable. But, nevertheless … 

“When I sing this song / Blah, Blah, Blah, they’ll talk again / Shut up, watch me kill this”: That’s the message that LE SSERAFIM sends in “Swan Song” to those who criticize them. Even as they sing these aggressive lyrics, though, their voices are the calmest sound on the track, and the arrangement strips away all other sounds to leave only the mournful main riff of the guitar. Until they sang the song that “will make history,” they had to live like swans whose “swimming never gets easier” and shed “so many days, so many nights, so many tears.” The tracks off EASY, including “Swan Song,” do nothing to hide the sorrow the group experiences behind the curtain. There are two sides to the person who yells out “shut up” as they “fear” that “love is never enough, I crave for more”: the confident woman dripping with swag, but also, the aching heart who curls up alone in her room every night. The opening to the track “EASY” (“I could get hurt but keep on walking kiss me / If it’s hard then I make it easy”) vividly encapsulates the musical way LE SSERAFIM expresses this sentiment. The part where “easy” is stretched out over a repetitive beat recalls old-school hip hop tracks. But the parts that come before are like a whisper intended directly for the listener, like the feeling that comes across when they sing, “kiss me,” and the arrangement of the calm melody overtop the trap beat creates a dynamic, poetic atmosphere. This is where the confident swag and the melancholy embrace of inner pain intersect. In “EASY,” HUH YUNJIN sings, “The light goes out and I wander in the night / Don’t know what is right,” almost as if rapping, or rather, raps almost as if singing. While being open about her sorrow and confusion after “the light goes out,” she foregoes self-pity and instead makes it look easy on top of the fast-paced hip hop beats. Throughout the track, the thumping beat and sorrowful melody, and the old-school-style rap and whispered singing, all blend seamlessly. The run of tracks “EASY,” “Swan Song,” and “Smart” is a new sound for LE SSERAFIM, following the trio of “FEARLESS,” “ANTIFRAGILE,” and “UNFORGIVEN,” as well as a lesson in how K-pop girl groups can adopt hip hop to suit their unique sound. Instead of placing the focus on a continuous beat and escalating to an emotional climax with ever stronger, ever flashier, ever higher-pitched sounds, they let some of the beat fall by the wayside or make adjustments to the emotional pacing. The accompanying choreography and performance for “EASY” take oft-seen hip hop dance moves and rearrange them completely. The movements themselves aren’t all that complex, but each member of the group synchronizes her moves with the others to assemble lightning-quick tableaus until it feels like the performance is being fast-forwarded and played at 0.5x speed simultaneously. On this new album, LE SSERAFIM doesn’t try to bring order to their chaotic lives. Instead, they found a way to exhibit that complexity in a different manner from their past three albums, in everything from their teaser videos to the songs and the dance performances. They find consistency in the complexity and produce something that now defines the new style of LE SSERAFIM. Looking at the names of the previous albums (FEARLESS, ANTIFRIGILE, and UNFORGIVEN) the group’s newly released EASY is relatively simple yet represents an unexpected shift in direction—one that not only carries over to the title of the album, but that can also be heard throughout the entirety of its tracks. Some might call it an easy listen and eye candy, but the process that goes into cultivating that mood certainly is anything but easy.

EASY is bookended by the tracks “Good Bones” and “We got so much,” and they go a long way to contrasting “EASY,” “Swan Song,” and “Smart” in the middle. While “Good Bones” is an intensely powerful rock expression of how, “despite it all, my ambition and aspirations are unstoppable,” the composition of “We got so much” suggests something closer to a traditional K-pop sound, with high notes in the chorus not much heard elsewhere on the album as the girls repeat, “We got so much love.” Where “EASY,” “Swan Song,” and “Smart” take the complex perspective that comes from the conflict between their inner selves and the world and presents it in an EASY way, by the time they arrive at the closer “We got so much,” they’re nevertheless expressing their feelings about the love they keep receiving. Through lyrics like, “Discover a side of me / The one that I never knew” (“We got so much”) they’re open and honest about their complicated lives through pain and swag painted across the entire album, redefining themselves. The album follows along a path of self-reflection, with open expressions of “ambition and aspirations” in “Good Bones,” to the realization that, “popular or unpopular / They’re all me” in “We got so much.” In this way, EASY seems, on the surface, to be exactly what its title suggests, but it’s also the beginning of a complex question that will require contemplation to answer—but in a way that’s easy to enjoy: “Who am I?”