Seventeen was a very good year: sneaking out to dance all night at Hugs&Kisses, swigging 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 lived in a relatively small city but I didn’t know anyone, or anything, so the nights felt rich and intoxicating, and ever so slightly dangerous. The first time you go out, your tiny internal world suddenly feels massive.
Big city life, the fabulous and melancholy new album by Smerz, distils this feeling into a potent moonshine. It’s romantic and itchily excitable music—a mixtape for the long train ride into the city and the delirious cab home, to hum at your retail job while you’re waiting to clock off—and it strikes, immediately, as Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt’s gesamtkunstwerk, a record that synthesizes the fright-night beats of 2018’s Have fun with the contemporary classical experiments of Believer and Før og etter and the arch electroclash of last year’s Allina.
On Big city life, all those paths twist together, creating dazzling formations: lush trip-hop torch songs, swaggering electro grooves, dance tracks that sound like Liquid Liquid blasting into an empty club after the lights come on. All this takes place in a romantasy version of Oslo where the streets are always rain-slicked and the clubs always smell like rare Baccarat Rouge 540—the perfect setting for modern fables about growing up, going out, and falling in love.
Like any good fairytale, Big city life begins with Smerz’s version of an “I Want” song. The title track will strike as familiar to anyone who’s woken up one day and realized they’re running on autopilot: “I heard the trip was great ha ha ha,” Motzfeld sings lifelessly. Day-to-day social niceties are anathema to Smerz; the only cure is “the freedom of a big city,” a wild, unscripted world where you’re not just repeating “I heard that they broke up ha ha ha” over and over at the social function.
Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt’s vocals frequently scan as droll, in the vein of other irony-drenched deadpan-pop duos like Coco & Clair Clair or New York, but there is a difference between Motzfeldt's anhedonia on the title track and, say, the sly encouragement with which Stoltenberg raps on “Roll the dice.” It’s their take on “Dancing Queen,” written entirely in the second person in hopes of reaching 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 is Smerz’s best party trick on Big city life: making music that reminds you of the club but is by no means club music. “Roll the dice”s is built around a slinky piano riff and what sounds like a chopped-up techno break, but moves with the affected looseness of Parker Posey dancing among the stacks in Party Girl. This is the zone of Big city life: the space between aspiration and reality.
Perhaps this is a fertile zone for Smerz because it’s less heartbreaking to write about the time before you saw the world for what it really is, when every sparkly dress made you look like Bianca Jagger and every grimy Uber felt like your white horse. “I’m realizing lately/That I won’t be like this again,” Motzfeldt sings on “A thousand lies,” each note putting a crack in her and Stoltenberg’s omniscient perch. No wonder, then, that time is a fixation on Big city life, not in the way Smerz write about it, but in the way they stretch and compress it, frequently indulging in songs that feel too slow or too fast, like they’re trying to fast-forward through the shitty party or make the summer nights last forever.
Sometimes, it’s so effective that you have to wonder what kind of witchcraft they’re working with. “You got time and I got money” is Sade’s “Like a Tattoo” by way of Chairlift’s lovedrunk “Show U Off” with the strings from “Bitter Sweet Symphony” thrown in for good measure. It feels like it stretches out for hours—but, wait, couldn’t it go on just a little longer?—and projects a relationship from dizzy crush to first night together to eternity. It’s timeless in small ways: “I like your shoes/I like these clean T-shirts on you,” sings Stoltenberg, like she’s trying to immortalize the tiny details.
Perhaps, Smerz suggest, this is a fundamental reason to switch off Netflix and drag yourself to a club filled with hack DJs and creepy former Tinder matches: There’s true love to be found under the strobes. “Baby, do you know how hearts collide?” asks Motzfeldt on “Dreams,” “Not in my daily moves from bed to bathroom.” Of course not—you have to go find it. And until then, Big city life’s stories of seedy afters and glamorous nights out have your back.
