Those silhouettes on the cover of Big city life? That’s you and me! Smerz’s latest and best album feels like it was made for projection. It’s not designed to be relatable, that most cursed descriptor of meaningless contemporary pop, but to be lived in, tailored to your body, snagged on the pedal of a Lime bike. In that sense, it lends itself fabulously to a remix album, and so arrives Big city life EDITS, an album of sinuous reinterpretations that highlights the endless plasticity of Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt’s voices and songwriting.
Across these 14 reworks, 18 acts write artful Smerz fan fiction: For the most part, the duo’s voices are left intact, but layered atop sounds far removed from the original record’s arch, deconstructed take on dance music. On Molina’s discomfitingly sexy version of “Roll the dice,” Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt seem to have taken a wrong turn off the high street and into one of those crusty dive bars that only plays hypnotic European dub; the song’s lyrics, so embodied and affirmative on the original, suddenly feel ominous, like you’re being lured somewhere you’re not supposed to be. The arty electroclash duo New York turn “Imagine this” into something that might have fit on After Dark 2, striking a perfect balance between high kitsch and high glamour.
If it can sometimes feel like “alternative” pop is simply real pop music that’s kind of unfinished—like, music that uses avant-garde texture or structure to hide a dearth of coherent ideas—Big city life EDITS proves that Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt’s songs have strong bones. The Copenhagen singer Fine plays “A thousand lies” straight: It’s just her voice atop a loose, jazz-folk arrangement, and it sounds like a lost cut from the Norman Fucking Rockwell! sessions. It’s not the only song on EDITS that conjures the spirit of Lana straight from the Bayou: On a rework of “You got time and I got money,” by Vilhelm Strange, Villads Tyrrestrup, Tobias Hansen, Zack Sekoff, and Jakob Littauer—credited here as VVTZJ—Clairo is a dead ringer for the singer circa Ultraviolence, warbling over an impossibly luxurious soul arrangement like a lounge singer playing her last show.
Fair play: A couple of informal tributes to the queen of idiosyncratically romantic, atmospheric pop makes perfect sense on an album that also serves as a starting lineup of uncompro-pop’s next generation. Big city life EDITS works so seamlessly—and feels so much like it’s just another Smerz album—that it’s easy to forget that it’s also a feat of A&Ring that brings together more than a dozen of the most interesting and talented producers currently working. I can imagine that, five to 10 years from now, teens will be posting the tracklist of Big city life EDITS on whatever newfangled social media platform I’ve dragged my lifeless body over to and asking “How did Smerz get MIKE, Erika de Casier, Astrid Sonne, and haloplus+ all on the same album?” At which point I will smile to myself, delete my account, and hit play on “You got time and I got money – VVTZJ EDIT,” happy that I got to witness it in the moment.
