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Seventeen was an unforgettable year: sneaking out to dance all night at Hugs&Kisses, downing peach schnapps from a jewel-encrusted flask at the Mercat Basement, being the first to arrive and the first to leave at Misty Nights. I resided in a relatively small city but felt like I didn’t know anyone or anything, making the nights feel rich, intoxicating, and slightly dangerous. The first time you venture out, your tiny internal world suddenly feels expansive.
Big city life, the dazzling and bittersweet new album by Smerz, captures this feeling with potent clarity. It’s both romantic and vibrantly thrilling—a mixtape for the long train ride into the city and the euphoric cab ride home, perfect for humming at your retail job while waiting to clock off—and it immediately stands out as Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt’s gesamtkunstwerk, a work that fuses the thrilling beats of 2018’s Have fun with the modern classical explorations of Believer and Før og etter, along with the innovative electroclash of last year’s Allina.
On Big city life, these pathways intertwine, forming stunning compositions: lush trip-hop ballads, strutting electro rhythms, and dance tracks that echo Liquid Liquid blasting into an empty club after the lights come on. All of this unfolds in a fantastical version of Oslo, where the streets are perpetually slick with rain and the clubs exude the scent of rare Baccarat Rouge 540—the ideal backdrop for contemporary tales about growing up, venturing out, and falling in love.
Like any captivating fairytale, Big city life opens with Smerz’s take on an “I Want” song. The title track resonates with anyone who has woken up to realize they’re on autopilot: “I heard the trip was great ha ha ha,” Stoltenberg sings in a flat tone. Daily social niceties are repugnant to Smerz; the only remedy is “the freedom of a big city,” an untamed, unscripted environment where you aren’t just repeating “I heard that they broke up ha ha ha” at social gatherings.
Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt’s vocals often come across as dryly humorous, akin to other irony-laden deadpan-pop duos like Coco & Clair Clair or New York, yet there’s a distinction between Motzfeldt’s anhedonia on the title track and the sly encouragement with which Stoltenberg raps on “Roll the dice.” It’s their interpretation of “Dancing Queen,” crafted entirely in the second person to reach the high-potential wallflower who needs it most: “When you’re here, all dressed up, looking ready and nice/Feel the places, walk the streets, and take no advice.” This encapsulates Smerz’s best party trick on Big city life: crafting music that evokes the club atmosphere without being strictly club music. “Roll the dice” is anchored by a sultry piano riff and what resembles a fragmented techno break, yet it moves with the nonchalant grace of Parker Posey dancing among the stacks in Party Girl. This embodies the realm of Big city life: the space between aspiration and reality.
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