Growing up is too serious: The Alchemy of Hope in Joshua Bassett’s "Easier"

There is a specific kind of album that arrives without a PR campaign. Most artists, especially those signed to major labels, don't make this choice. The industry prefers controlled introduction, it wants you primed before you press play.

Joshua Bassett doesn't seem to care what the industry prefers. On Friday, August 14th, 2026, he dropped Easier,— his sophomore album — with essentially zero announcement, zero promotional push, and seemingly zero blessing from Plush Records, the Warner sub-label releasing it... which is either a disaster or accidentally the most fitting delivery mechanism possible for music that feels this unguarded. After repeated listens, I can confidently say this might be the most intentional and personal music Bassett has ever written. His 2024 debut, The Golden Years, was emotionally raw and often cathartic; but it also felt scattered in the way that survival documents tend to be. The grief was real, the urgency was real, and the sequencing was all over the place. Songs like 'Dancing with Tears in My Eyes' and 'Wildfire' were extraordinary on their own terms, but the album as a whole read more like a purge than a narrative. Easier has a fuller story, running in one clear direction: from love, to ruin, to something that might, carefully, be called gratitude; and Bassett tells it front to back with the kind of restraint that only comes when a person actually knows what they want to say.

That restraint lives in the production too. Almost every track is built on acoustic guitar, occasional piano, and a campfire rawness that makes you feel like you're overhearing something rather than being presented with it. There's no autotune as armor, no overproduction to smooth the edges. You can hear, in places, exactly where Bassett's voice doubles itself — not for harmony but for weight, to make certain words land harder. It's not a production choice that announces itself. It's one you notice on the third listen, and then you can't stop noticing it.

*Before I continue, and unrelated to this review, I want you to read on what happened in Colombia on August 10th. "Little Rita" and "Hold Me"  are hitting specially hard for us these days. If you can donate or spread the word, I invite you to do so <3

Reclaiming the Hue

The album opens with "Blue" which I've already reviewed at length before, so I'll keep it brief: it's a love song, simple and dreamy, and it matters more here as part of a sequence than it does standing alone. Because what Bassett is doing — and this only becomes clear once you've reached the final track — is showing you exactly where this relationship begins before he shows you how it ends. "Blue"  is the baseline of joy. Everything that follows is a slow descent from it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXiQ7lEel88&list=PLUFkTDdG2Pq8&index=1

"Dancing on the Edge," extends that baseline with something warmer and more electric: synthesizers, a guitar solo that genuinely made me pause the recording to replay, and a Harry Styles-adjacent 80s pop energy that Bassett pulls off without losing himself in the reference. It sounds like him, specifically, which is the whole challenge with that kind of influence. The song is a summer fling anthem — walking the tightrope between fun and something that could hurt you.

Then the album shifts. And this is where it gets good.

The Anatomy of a Fallout

"Selfish, Love" is the shortest track here at 3:05, but the comma in the title is doing more structural work than anything else on the record. I keep thinking about the scene in Hamilton where Angelica fixates on the comma in Alexander's letter — "my dearest, Angelica" versus "my dearest Angelica" — because the difference changes everything about who is being addressed. It's not a song about a selfish kind of love, but rather about him speaking to his love, telling her: I am selfish. The comma turns a noun into a confession. And the song earns it. "The cigarettes are catching up / they're killing me slowly" is delivered so plainly that it almost slips by, and then it doesn't. "Push and pull, it's getting old / getting sick of myself" lands like a man who knows, with painful clarity, exactly what pattern he keeps repeating and cannot seem to break — not because he doesn't care, but because the caring and the pattern are happening at the same time, in the same body, without resolution.

"Hold Me" carries that same emotional architecture — two people who have genuinely worn each other down — and produces the sharpest single line on the album:

"I'm tired of fighting. Why aren't we even friends?"

The word "even" is the one that does the damage. Because it's not "why are we even friends" — which would be questioning the value of the relationship, suggesting it might be time to walk away. It's asking why they can't achieve something more basic than that. Why they can't land in the neutral, peaceful space of simple coexistence. There's a whole tragedy compressed into that one word: the realisation that things have deteriorated so completely that even baseline isn't available anymore.

"Clouds" is the track I wasn't prepared for. It's slow, piano-forward, deceptively plain, and it contains a lyric — "we don't talk like we used to, honey / if you called, I'd still pick up" — that I am not going to be able to write about with full objectivity, because I am currently losing contact with someone I care about very much. So I'll just say this: the song is a cry for communication dressed up as a quiet observation. "Tell me you love me / make me believe in something." It's the kind of lyric that sounds simple until you're the person who needed to hear it first. And then it's not simple at all.

Here's where I'll be honest, though, because this review wouldn't be doing its job if I weren't: "I Still Care" and the title track, "Easier", both gave me what I can only call pick-me guy energy — and I say that with affection, but also with critique. There are moments in both songs where Bassett tells his ex she's better off with someone who's ready to love her, then seems genuinely stung that she actually went and found one. In "Easier" specifically, he sings "I know you're better off with someone who's ready to love" and then, almost in the same breath, "I know that Ezra is good for you / it's only salt in the cut." As a listener, I found myself wanting to say: you don't get to release her and then grieve when she goes. You don't get both... or do you? So, the more I sat with it, the more I thought about what it actually sounds like inside someone's head when they're the one who caused the damage and they know it.

The logic is contradictory because grief is contradictory. You can know you were wrong, take responsibility for it, and still feel the absence like something that was stolen from you. That doesn't make it fair, it's simply human. Whether you find that compelling or exhausting probably depends on where you're standing in your own life.

The Choice to Stay

"Ruined" is where the album places its heaviest bet, and I'm still undecided on whether it pays off. It's the longest track at 4 minutes 28 seconds — his longest yet — built in a minor key and anchored on a line that doesn't let you look away: "she's in my arms, but you're on my mind." The question that raises is real and worth sitting with. Is this a straightforward confession of emotional cheating? Or is it something more complicated — the way a past relationship can rewrite your neural pathways so thoroughly that every new person you hold is somehow also a comparison, a ghost, an echo? Bassett doesn't answer it, and I think that's intentional. The ambiguity is the point. What I will say is that the one-minute instrumental outro tested my patience. On first listen I thought it was self-indulgent. On second listen I thought it was about forty seconds too long. On third listen I started to hear it differently — like being made to sit in a silence that won't resolve — but I'm not entirely convinced. That's a personal note, not a verdict.

"No One Loves Like You" is the closing track, and it is the right ending in every way that matters. Not because it resolves the pain — it doesn't — but because it reframes the entire album in a single move. After nine tracks of "I am broken, you deserve someone better", the last song is him finally, quietly, saying: and you stayed. "I go through hell, you walk me out / when I'm too high, you pull me down." This is what love as a choice actually sounds like — not the falling, which is passive, which just happens to you, but the staying, which is something you do every day on purpose with full awareness of the cost. That distinction is the thesis of the whole record. It brings everything back to "Blue" which was also about joy but was about falling — the feeling arriving out of nowhere, unbidden. The circle closes. The colour holds a different meaning now.

A lot of people won't hear this album. Plush Records has made sure of that by simply doing nothing with it, which is a choice that says a lot about what major labels know how to sell and what quietly baffles them. Easier is not easily packaged. It's not upbeat enough for a playlist and not sad enough to trend on a bad day. It's just honest, which is the rarest thing in pop music and, apparently, the hardest thing to market.

For those who do find it: it's worth the time. Not every track lands with equal force, and there are moments where Bassett's self-awareness trips over itself. But the album knows what it's doing in a way his debut didn't, and the best of it — the comma in "Selfish, Love", the word "even" in "Hold Me" , the love-as-choice thesis in the closer — is the kind of thing that stays with you, rewrites a little of how you think about something. That's not nothing. That's a lot, actually.

About the artist

Joshua Bassett is a 25-year-old actor and singer-songwriter best known for his role as Ricky Bowen on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. He released his debut album The Golden Years in 2024 to strong fan reception and critical attention, and recently published a memoir, Rookie: My Public, Private, and Secret Life, in which he spoke candidly about his experiences navigating mental health and the pressures of early fame. Easier is his most musically restrained and narratively focused work to date — and, if there's any justice, not the last time we hear from this version of him.