Album Review: Big city life by Smerz

A Big City, a new Life. Norwegian duo Smerz find themselves in places that make you feel as big as they can make you feel small. Written between Copenhagen, Oslo, and New York, the group builds minimalist worlds out of fleeting moments. No frills and no flowers take up unwanted space, all of their effort goes into pouring as much as they can into the simple things, encouraging the different pieces of each song to mutate, morph, and evolve into their own entities.

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Catharina Soltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt, known as the Norwegian art pop duo Smerz, have bottled the events of a night out with its ecstasy and fleetingness and gloom through 2021's experimental odyssey Believer or last year's fictional pop star Allina, but on Big city life, they head straight to the party. Their ability to make music about the club and not necessarily in it is strange and unwavering. "Roll the dice", with its stilted delivery and jabby piano, shouldn't be a peppy number, but its lyrics point in that direction: "You're a girl in the streets / And you shouldn't think twice… / Let the city lights surround you / Make it shimmer, make it bright.

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Big City Life isn't so much an album as it is a masterful sequence of gestures: flickers of sound, half-decisions, the musical equivalent of shrugging while making eye contact. The Norwegian duo - Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt - still sound like they're texting each other ideas at odd hours, deliberately left open-ended to preserve their magic. Smerz are still working in the zone where club music, art-school minimalism, and emotional confession overlap.

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With an exacting gaze and arched eyebrow, ‘Big city life ' maps out the rhythms and rituals of the inner-city woman. It's a fizzing postmodern fairytale that takes us by the hand through dim clubs, empty train carriages, wide streets and bedrooms full of longing. In the city of Norwegian duo Smerz's creation, tricksy tunes neighbour bleary confessions, with the expanse of styles spun into the album mirroring the intricacies and shadows of this world.

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