smush's 'Lawyers in Love' is a cover that feels like a dream you only half remember

Some covers are tributes. Others are reinventions. But smush’s take on 'Lawyers in Love' is something stranger, softer, and infinitely more alluring. The Brooklyn duo have never played by the rules of reinterpretation, and this opening gesture of their upcoming covers EP 'standards' feels more like a séance.

Where the original walks with sly swagger, smush let the song melt into a haze of reverb, fractured percussion, and guitars that flicker like light bouncing off old film stock. Emily King’s voice is tender, hushed, and impossibly close, like someone singing a secret just inches from your ear. It’s the kind of delivery that stops a room cold.

Atley King’s production shapeshifts underneath her, dissolving the familiar structure into something fluid and spectral. Guitars stretch into shadows. Beats fragment like broken glass. The whole track drifts with the woozy grace of a love letter reread years too late. It’s shoegaze, bedroom pop, and indie-folk through a warped mirror, and yet somehow it all feels unmistakably smush.

'Lawyers in Love' tugs at the thread of longing tucked between the original’s lines and unravels it until the whole thing glows from within. This is smush stripping away irony, leaning into ache, and trusting subtlety over spectacle.

If 'standards' is meant to trace the songs that shaped their artistic compass, this first release shows that smush are now rewriting their DNA. And if this shimmering, slow-motion reinvention is the entry point, the rest of the EP might just redraw the boundaries of what a cover can be.