smush have always had a gift for making vulnerability feel widescreen, but with their reimagining of ‘Lawyers in Love’, the Brooklyn duo step into a new realm entirely where nostalgia gets disassembled, rewired, and resurrected as something hauntingly original. It’s the opening chapter in their forthcoming covers collection ‘standards’, and if this track is the bar they’re setting, 2026 is about to get very interesting.
The original song’s wry charm and sly commentary dissolve into something dream-soaked and intimate. Emily King’s voice arrives like a soft beam through fog, the kind of vocal that makes you feel like you’re standing in the same room, afraid to breathe too loudly. While Atley King’s arrangement pulls the floor out from under the track, replacing the familiar pulse with a spectral drift of warped guitars, fractured rhythms, and textures that flicker like spliced memories. It’s equal parts shoegaze shimmer, bedroom-pop experimentation, and late-night confession.
smush take the bones of the Hotline TNT original and rebuild it into something trembling and luminous, leaning into their talent for making the familiar feel eerily unfamiliar. Where many reinterpretations try to polish or modernise, smush opt for emotional excavation by finding the ache between the lines and letting it bloom.
There’s also a quiet thrill in knowing this was shaped at home, then sculpted with the ear of Sonny DiPerri, whose past credits read like a syllabus for alt-leaning sonic maximalism. But the magic here is the way every tiny detail feels purposeful, like it’s carrying its own small ghost.
If ‘standards’ is meant to trace the songs that shaped smush as artists, ‘Lawyers in Love’ makes it clear they’re reshaping their influences into new terrain. The duo stretch, twist, and animate these melodies until they feel like chapters of their own story.
smush have turned a cult favourite into a slow-motion heartbreaker that dissolves and reforms as you listen. It’s brave, beautifully strange, and unmistakably theirs; proof that their rise in Brooklyn’s alt underground is the beginning of something much larger.
