Smerz Are the Norwegian Duo Making Off-Kilter Pop Music for the Ages

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.