Seventeen was an excellent 12 months: sneaking out to bop all evening at Hugs&Kisses, swigging peach schnapps from a jewel-encrusted flask on the Mercat Basement, being the primary to reach and the primary to go away 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 out of the blue feels huge.
Large 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 experience into town and the delirious cab dwelling, to hum at your retail job when you’re ready to clock off—and it strikes, instantly, as Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt’s gesamtkunstwerk, a file 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 12 months’s Allina.
On Large 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 at all times rain-slicked and the golf equipment at all times odor like uncommon Baccarat Rouge 540—the proper setting for contemporary fables about rising up, going out, and falling in love.
Like several good fairytale, Large metropolis life begins with Smerz’s model of an “I Need” track. The title monitor will strike as acquainted to anybody who’s woken up at some point 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 operate.
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 monitor and, say, the sly encouragement with which she raps on “Roll the cube.” It’s their tackle “Dancing Queen,” written completely within the second particular person in hopes of reaching the high-potential wallflower who wants it most: “Once 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 finest celebration trick on Large metropolis life: making music that reminds you of the membership however is certainly not membership music. “Roll the cube”s is constructed round a slinky piano riff and what feels like a chopped-up techno break, however strikes with the affected looseness of Parker Posey dancing among the many stacks in Celebration Lady. That is the zone of Large metropolis life: the area between aspiration and actuality.
