Seventeen was an excellent yr: sneaking out to bop all night time at Hugs&Kisses, swigging peach schnapps from a jewel-encrusted flask on the Mercat Basement, being the primary to reach and the primary to depart at Misty Nights. I lived in a comparatively small metropolis however I didn’t know anybody, or something, so the nights felt wealthy and intoxicating, and ever so barely harmful. The primary time you exit, your tiny inside world instantly feels large.
Huge metropolis life, the fabulous and melancholy new album by Smerz, distils this sense right into a potent moonshine. It’s romantic and itchily excitable music—a mixtape for the lengthy prepare trip into the town and the delirious cab residence, to hum at your retail job whilst you’re ready to clock off—and it strikes, instantly, as Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt’s gesamtkunstwerk, a report that synthesizes the fright-night beats of 2018’s Have enjoyable with the up to date classical experiments of Believer and Før og etter and the arch electroclash of final yr’s Allina.
On Huge metropolis life, all these paths twist collectively, creating dazzling formations: lush trip-hop torch songs, swaggering electro grooves, dance tracks that sound like Liquid Liquid blasting into an empty membership after the lights come on. All this takes place in a romantasy model of Oslo the place the streets are all the time rain-slicked and the golf equipment all the time odor like uncommon Baccarat Rouge 540—the proper setting for contemporary fables about rising up, going out, and falling in love.
Like all good fairytale, Huge metropolis life begins with Smerz’s model of an “I Need” track. The title observe will strike as acquainted to anybody who’s woken up in the future and realized they’re operating on autopilot: “I heard the journey was nice ha ha ha,” Stoltenberg sings lifelessly. Day-to-day social niceties are anathema to Smerz; the one treatment is “the liberty of a giant metropolis,” a wild, unscripted world the place you’re not simply repeating “I heard that they broke up ha ha ha” again and again on the social perform.
Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt’s vocals ceaselessly scan as droll, within the vein of different irony-drenched deadpan-pop duos like Coco & Clair Clair or New York, however there’s a distinction between Stoltenberg’s anhedonia on the title observe and, say, the sly encouragement with which she raps on “Roll the cube.” It’s their tackle “Dancing Queen,” written completely within the second individual in hopes of reaching the high-potential wallflower who wants it most: “If you’re right here, all dressed up, wanting prepared and good/Really feel the locations, stroll the streets, and take no recommendation.” That is Smerz’s greatest occasion trick on Huge metropolis life: making music that reminds you of the membership however is under no circumstances membership music. “Roll the cube”s is constructed round a slinky piano riff and what appears like a chopped-up techno break, however strikes with the affected looseness of Parker Posey dancing among the many stacks in Celebration Woman. That is the zone of Huge metropolis life: the house between aspiration and actuality.
