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Big city life is a collection of feelings and moments gathered by Smerz over the past four years. It is a sonic rite of passage, a transition in many forms documented through songs and production. While known for being world-builders en passant, instinctively constructing total imaginative spaces, Big city life is not built. Though still a collage, Smerz are looking at their own world instead of constructing one.
Formerly based in Copenhagen, Denmark, the duo recently relocated to their birthplace of Oslo, Norway, but not before living in and passing through other big cities. Perspective is fluid for Smerz, as experience teaches them relativism: both Copenhagen and Oslo are, in reality, small cities. Big city life, thus, embraces such flips in view, loving the small and adoring the big. Smerz’s signature, and the place where magic is located, is in their travels between the two ways of looking and considering the world.
The lyrics, noticeably present and direct, guide the listener between fiction and reality. All are rooted in experience, or perhaps many experiences, distilled into distinct packages of word and sound. Stories lived and imagined—of friendship, apathy, loneliness and internal monologue, love, and full-blown, near-manic freedom.
Some songs are advice to ourselves. Others exist just to release pent-up energy. Some emerge from pure passivity, while others become doorways into dreams. Some songs are secret wishes. Some are written for someone who is not here. And some are predictions.
The sound of Big city life is synergistic and deeply personal: mushy, groovy, and strange. Henriette and Catharina have held everything close, writing, performing, recording, and mixing all their own work. That intimacy is important when moving from one place to another, creating something new from the cauldron of change.
Some songs just happen—written in five minutes, a pure hit of emotion—while others are drawn out, taking years to come together. Like the liquid metal of the T-1000, sounds are blown to pieces across the world only to reform into something whole. Catharina describes songwriting as an attempt to capture a moment or, better yet, to stretch it, to make it last.
You got time and I got money was one of those songs that just happened in a moment. A soul-sample-like beat and sweeping string arrangements—something classic, something familiar—wrapped in Smerz’s voices and the bold minimalism that defines them. “It is a love song,” says Catharina Stoltenberg. “Some songs just come from what’s happening in real time. I wrote the lyrics when I got my first real grown-up job and was in love at the same time.”
Roll the dice. A minimal drum-synth-piano-riff, soft-cornered and groovy, carries this anthem to yourself. There’s a certain self-awareness in “You’ve been here before, so you know this at last,” that Catharina sings to herself. The song took shape in a very dull room, reminiscing about returning to New York, 50% real memories and 50% made up. “It’s a post something situation song,a thought experiment in a taxi on the way home.”
A thousand lies. Opening with a reverberated piano riff echoing the light, airy feel of a ’90s film score, the track suddenly dives into a hypnotic, arpeggiated electronic pattern while their unmistakable voices weave through the composition like a conversation unfolding in real time—decoding and encoding the complexities of companionship. It’s Smerz at their most intimate, drawing listeners into a world where reality and memory blur, crafting a new place to be.
Big city life moves like a conversation through a day in the life—staccato synths stab a tempo, drums crack and tumble, a circular piano riff ticks away like a clock, marking time but still not on time.
But I do. “Something that has been a theme in a few of the songs is this feeling—thinking you are one thing, but realizing you haven’t really changed. You’re still your old self, but you can sense and see what you will become. There’s some self-criticism there—a tool of exorcism.”
On Dreams, the sonic palette stretches toward the sky—synthesizers elevate, reaching higher, while at the same time sounding like a completely crushed EDM dance floor. All the while, Henriette’s vocals turn inward, drenched in reverb, chanting as if casting a spell: “Dream about me, dream about me.” “I’m trying to make someone dream about me—attempting to steer someone. The thing is, dreams are the one thing you can control the least. So trying to do so was, I guess, almost a disillusioned action/reaction to reality.”
Listening to the album is to enter a friendly maze or view a familiar collage. It’s the energy of two teenagers whispering a song in their bedroom, afraid to break the moment. It’s grown and earned, too, with its extroverted and shiny energy, the kind of unhinged freedom where you abandon caution. The album’s multiple perspectives stacked on top of each other are fragile and chaotic, adding up to poetic but distorted conversations. Smerz embodies the vibrating tension, that in-between space where awkwardness and confidence crash into each other and reveal something that has always existed.
Smerz
Big city life
Escho
Tracklist:
Big city life
But I do
Roll the dice
What
Feisty
A thousand lies
Close
You got time and I got money
Big dreams
Street style
Imagine this
Dreams
Easy
Connect with Smerz:
Smerz’ critically acclaimed debut album Believer (2021) had The FACE saying “Smerz have created a lane all their own.” Always evolving, they continue shaping both underground and mainstream soundscapes—from the conceptual pop of ALLINA (2024) to their production work on NewJeans’ Get Up EP (2023). Their longtime NTS residency has served as a playground for their expansive influences, showcasing friends and music they admire while seamlessly blending everything from Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin to footwork pioneer RP Boo. Occasionally stepping into theater, film, and museums, from their choir piece at the MUNCH Museum to fashion runway soundtracks, throughout their work, Smerz have been known for their ability to seamlessly navigate and create boundless sonic worlds. Big city life unfolds in the real world.
