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While promoting their debut album, 2021’s Believer, Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt, the duo behind the cult alt-pop duo Smerz, remarked upon the fact that doing press interviews and photo shoots wasn’t exactly something they enjoyed. You could chalk that up to the fact that, as Scandinavians—dividing their time between Oslo, where they’re from, and Copenhagen—self-promotion doesn’t come totally naturally to them. (Perhaps the Danish concept of Janteloven, which speaks to a wider moral code woven through Nordic society discouraging expressions of personal ambition or success, is to blame.)
Talking to them in the week before the release of their stellar second album, Big City Life, I have to ask first: Has that element of being a musician got any easier for them, or begun to feel more natural? “No,” says Stoltenberg, without hesitation.
“No,” Motzfeldt adds, with an apologetic laugh. “Sorry about that.”
“But, you know, sometimes it’s good to have these conversations,” Stoltenberg continues. “After you make some music and you’re getting ready to put it out into the world, it’s nice to try to sit down and figure out what it is, or what happened here. Even if the conversations are a bit more vague or open-ended, I think it’s a good reminder for us that… that’s okay.”
There’s certainly a mysterious, open-ended quality to Smerz’s music, although given the remarkable precision of their songwriting and production, “vague” isn’t necessarily the word I would use. On Big City Life, the duo flit deftly between genres—dream pop, glitchy electro, power ballads, shoegaze, even shades of trip-hop on album closer “Easy”—whipping up all these textures into a sonic soufflé that is uniquely their own. And where their previous records have erred towards the cryptic (at least lyrically), on Big City Life, they’re making room for big, overwhelming feelings: take the brazenly sensual yearning captured on the twinkling “Big Dreams,” or the woozy rush of being head-over-heels in love so beautifully captured on lead single “You Got Time and I Got Money,” the melody of which you could just as easily imagine being sung in a smoky 1920s Paris jazz club as at an underground club night in 2020s Berlin.
“We had a period of listening to cabaret music, and more traditional songwriting, quite a lot, which I guess stitches together the last album and this one somehow,” says Motzfeldt. And the emotional maturity, for lack of a better term, that courses through the album—despite the fizzy, bratty fun of “Feisty,” there’s an air of hard-earned, melancholic wisdom that colors tracks like “Street Style” and album highlight “A Thousand Lies”—can also be explained by the pair having grown up a little. “We started making music in a sort of club music environment, and at some point, that disappeared, and we didn’t find ourselves inside those clubs that often,” says Stoltenberg, discussing the album’s more straightforward lyrics.
Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt’s friendship was first sparked while at high school in Oslo; then, in the early 2010s, they moved to Copenhagen together for university, Stoltenberg to study math and statistics, Motzfeldt to study music composition at the city’s prestigious Rhythmic Music Conservatory. The close-knit community of experimental musicians that orbited the latter—other recent graduates include Erika de Casier, ML Buch, and Astrid Sonne, all artists with a similar interest in the porous outer regions of pop—encouraged them to form Smerz, the name being an abbreviated form of the German word Herzschmerz, meaning heartache.
Given its clever production and Stoltenberg’s consciously dispassionate vocals, Big City Life could easily come across as forbiddingly cool. But there’s a sincerity and a wide-eyed romance to so many of the songs—as well as, on tracks like “Feisty,” a playfulness and winking humor—that lends the project a whole lot of heart instead. Both Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt note that much of the album came from dark nights of the soul they experienced over the past few years. “I guess we have both moved in and out of some different relationships, and we ve also moved cities, from Copenhagen to Oslo, and a bit back again,” says Stoltenberg. “The beginning of the writing of this album was the beginning of a lot of shifts in our personal lives.”
That’s not to say it’s all been doom and gloom, however: “You Got Time and I Got Money,” in particular, serves as an exquisite showcase of their more upbeat side. “I think it’s the fact that song captures something happy, something that is filled with bright colors, which feels rare, I think—both to capture in music, but also to feel that in your own life,” says Stoltenberg. “It doesn’t happen that often, and it doesn’t always last that long. It was nice to put something out into the world that felt positive and pure.”
This rich variety of moods across the album was very much intentional, they explain. “Previously, we’ve often had texture or sound as the starting point or sketch of a song—it wasn’t so planned,” Stoltenberg continues. “I think that’s how we got into making music: exploring sounds and where they take us. But on this album, we more often had lyrics and melodies as starting points.” It’s this, in part, which led to the more focused themes of the record—love, loneliness, and the ups and downs of nights out on the town—as well as to its meticulously calibrated production. “I guess music is always somehow about cracking a code,” Motzfeldt adds. “But it doesn t have to be the same code every time.”
The visual world surrounding Big City Life is equally distinct, whether the eerie, warped silhouettes traipsing across the black-and-white tiles of a piazza—or is that a dance floor?—on the album cover; or the lo-fi videos accompanying the singles, which collage together what appears to be found footage from road trips around the world with a superimposed Stoltenberg singing into the microphone as if she’s in a late-night karaoke bar, or the pair leaning flirtily against a lamppost and strutting across a casino floor in Las Vegas. “I think we thought it was going to be difficult to translate the songs into videos, so at some point, we decided to make them simply to be exactly how the songs felt,” says Stoltenberg. In the case of “You Got Time and I Got Money,” it was about capturing “that sensation of floating almost, that physical sensation when you’re just very comfortable with someone,” she adds. “Once we figured that out, we solved the puzzle really.”
When it came to bringing that world to life, they enlisted the help of their close friends and regular collaborators Benjamin Barron and Bror August Vestbø of the Paris-based fashion label All-In. (Memorably, they also worked together to craft a fictional teen-idol pop star named “Allina” for All-In’s spring 2024 collection, with Smerz even creating an eight-track EP to accompany it.)
For Big City Life, Barron and August Vestbø co-directed all of the videos alongside Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt. While much of that previously mentioned footage appears to be archival, it was actually shot on road trips they took together across the US and Norway. Stoltenberg notes that one of the parallels between their creative processes is that both duos like to absorb as much as possible, and then edit things down: “The way they work with their clothes, even more so at the beginning, was that they would gather a lot of stuff and then they’d have all this material to play around with,” she says. “That reminded us of the way we gather a lot of samples and then try to sculpt something out of things that already exist.”
That connection with Barron and August Vestbø also speaks to another reason Big City Life feels so breathlessly alive: it’s clearly rooted in the bonds of deep friendship—both between Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt and with their wider community. When I ask them how they’re feeling about the album’s impending release, they’re disarmingly chill—because, Stoltenberg says, “everyone we work with now, we know them so well.” Even their record label manager, Nis Bysted of the Copenhagen-based Escho, is an old friend. “That feeling of friendship and work being a bit blended is nice for us,” she says. “The decisions we make move along more naturally.”
Which goes some way to explaining why the album’s opening track, “Big City Life,” feels so striking. “The day goes by, don’t have much to say / I heard that they broke up, hahaha,” Motzfeldt sings, with knowing detachment, over chugging, arrhythmic synths and a plinky-plonky piano line. “The title track was written very early in the process, when I was living alone in this big apartment after all my roommates had moved out,” says Motzfeldt. “It was a strange time, and I was spending a lot of it inside. So the title maybe has some apathy to it—the way you can live as a human in this box, but surrounded by people in the city. You can walk among those people and still feel very alone. It’s about those quite drastic shifts between those feelings of solitude, and the reality of this very action-filled life going on with so many people right outside.” It’s exactly that ability to identify the sweeping, transcendent feelings that can come out of the smallest, most everyday moments—and capture them like lightning in a bottle—that lends Smerz their strange, special magic.
