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,…
Tag Archive: Smerz
…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…