FEATURE: Spotlight: Smerz — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Smerz

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I have spotlighted…

a few duos already this year. I think most people are highlighting bands or solo artists, but duos are less common and less commonly discussed. Smerz are a Norwegian duo of Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt. Smerz hail from Oslo and make music that can be described as Experimental Pop/Electronic. I will finish ff with a review of the duo’s 2025 album, Big city life. I am starting with Vogue and their interview. Chatting with Smerz and their off-kilter Pop music for the ages, there are some sections of the interview I was keen to highlight:

“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.

“We had a period of listening to cabaret music, and more traditional songwriting, quite a lot, which I guess stitches together the last album and this one somehow,” says Motzfeldt. And the emotional maturity, for lack of a better term, that courses through the album—despite the fizzy, bratty fun of “Feisty,” there’s an air of hard-earned, melancholic wisdom that colors tracks like “Street Style” and album highlight “A Thousand Lies”—can also be explained by the pair having grown up a little. “We started making music in a sort of club music environment, and at some point, that disappeared, and we didn’t find ourselves inside those clubs that often,” says Stoltenberg, discussing the album’s more straightforward lyrics.

Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt’s friendship was first sparked while at high school in Oslo; then, in the early 2010s, they moved to Copenhagen together for university, Stoltenberg to study math and statistics, Motzfeldt to study music composition at the city’s prestigious Rhythmic Music Conservatory. The close-knit community of experimental musicians that orbited the latter—other recent graduates include Erika de Casier, ML Buch, and Astrid Sonne, all artists with a similar interest in the porous outer regions of pop—encouraged them to form Smerz, the name being an abbreviated form of the German word Herzschmerz, meaning heartache.

Given its clever production and Stoltenberg’s consciously dispassionate vocals, Big City Life could easily come across as forbiddingly cool. But there’s a sincerity and a wide-eyed romance to so many of the songs—as well as, on tracks like “Feisty,” a playfulness and winking humor—that lends the project a whole lot of heart instead. Both Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt note that much of the album came from dark nights of the soul they experienced over the past few years. “I guess we have both moved in and out of some different relationships, and we've also moved cities, from Copenhagen to Oslo, and a bit back again,” says Stoltenberg. “The beginning of the writing of this album was the beginning of a lot of shifts in our personal lives”.

I realise several of my Spotlight features concern artists that are not brand new. Smerz have been releasing music since 2017, they are a duo that I think everyone needs to know about. I must admit I have not included an artist who has been making music for that long, but I have seen others spotlight Smerz for success this year. Though not a new or rising duo, they are one that are going to help shape and define Pop music this year. Before getting to a review of their most recent album, there are two more interviews I am including. PAPER spoke with Smerz back in the summer. A duo living their own big city life, I have been following them, I think since 2022, and maybe their fanbase is not quite as large as it should be. However, with every album and year that passes, they recruit new fans around the world:

“Big city life is a continued conversation between the Smerz duo, who have already created a thematically and musically varied set of works since 2017 via a debut EP, a full-length album, and a number of collaborations and compositional projects. On this new album, they've pared down the scale of their artistic wanderings, choosing to create a poignant portrait of life in their (relatively small) home city of Oslo.

Highlights include “Roll the dice,” which finds the duo delivering a self-affirmation before a night out on the town. “You’re a girl in the city and you shouldn’t think twice/ You take two steps forward, keep your eyes on the prize,” they hum over a beat that features an almost slapstick piano line, atonal and coy. Or look at the smashing fun of “Feisty,” which is the album at its most uptempo. A clanging 707 hi hat melds with a set of strings that could be ripped from aVanessa Cartlon cut. Meanwhile the duo hum about the small, innocuous details of a night of drinking and flirting (“He likes to seem mysterious but really he's just dumb/ It's crowded at the toilet, I check my makeup and my bum”).

Smerz’s renewed focus on local tedium was spurred by a major move. They started their career in Copenhagen, a central part of its alt pop scene, which includes fellow artists Erika de Casier, ML Buch, Astrid Sonne and Fine Glindvad (Motzfeldt went to school with many of them at the important Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen).

“We developed our whole musical life in Copenhagen. Everyone we know and everywhere we go has some connection to music,” says Stoltenberg. Collectively, their crew of Copenhagen colleagues became a global musical force, receiving an upsurge of interest in 2023 when Smerz, de Casier and Glindvad all contributed to K-pop stars NewJeans’ EP Get Up (Smerz produced EP closer “ASAP”).

It was time, though, for a change. They moved back to their hometown during COVID. Both were coming out of relationships and thus re-entering single life just as the world was fluctuating between various levels of lockdowns and reopenings. There, in Oslo, they could linger in the specificities of home: its culture, its rhythm, its “grey and green” landscape. And there, they could document their everyday experience in Oslo through surprising, instinctual works of pop reportage.

It’s hard not to connect their deep hometown connection to Stoltenberg’s own exceptional tie to the country. Her father, Jens Stoltenberg, was Prime Minister of the small EU nation twice between 2000 and 2013. Stoltenberg doesn’t speak publicly about her family’s political ties, but her ability to largely avoid the topic speaks to Norway’s vastly different social system: where wealth disparity is minimized by a social safety net and the general social code revolves around janteloven, “disdainful attitude to extraordinary achievements … [or] the Nordic trait of placing the value of equality above all else.”

On Big city life, Smerz streamlined everything, comparing its musical creation to a “band jamming.” They assembled a “library” of a few core sounds: a drum machine, software pianos, synthy strings which sound like they’re plucked out of a ‘90s TV documentary’s score. “These songs were made quite fast, with a focus on the songwriting, and less focus on the sounds and the textures,” Stoltenberg shares. “By working a bit more quickly and not focusing as much on the production, you can capture some spontaneous mood or feeling of whatever state you're in”.

Actually I think I will end now with a review. Not a new duo or breaking through, I think it is a perfect time to feature Smerz, as they had a brilliant year las year. Big city life was hugely acclaimed. This is what The Line of Best Fit about one of the strongest offerings from 2025. I do think that Big city life took their music to a new audience. Never resting on their laurels or repeating what went before, I think we will see Smerz releasing music for a very long time to come:

“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." It has all the feel of a first night out in a new place, feeling the buzz of concrete and metal pulse. On the record’s mesmerizing opening track, too, they marvel at “The freedom of a big city,” one that can stifle as well as open yourself up to new possibilities. Everything is available, which makes everything daunting.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than on the album’s beguiling and wonderful centerpiece, “Feisty”. It’s an oddly simple, deadpanned-approach to the club where every line is delivered in accordance with the physics of the night, no dressing or metaphor. Rather, simple descriptions abound: “Makeup on my mind, these shoes so far down / Little red skirt and a blouse my mother found,” like an anthropologist taking notes for those who couldn’t make it. Their writing is complex in its simplicity – further on, they groan at an art school gang who shows up, “and they’re always plenty.” Why “plenty”? There are hundreds of adjectives that would better give focus to the group, but instead, they note the size of the crowd, like a foggy, dense, outline of what’s happening. Whether this is a language kerfuffle or a genuine literary moment, it’s a mind-snagging line that barely says anything. Maybe they’re taking a cue from the gang themselves: “They don’t say much, use their art to show compassion.”

Smerz isn’t always at the club though, and Big city life benefits from periods of downtime. On the refreshingly sincere trip-hop “You got time and I got money”, they slowdance around simple affectations: “I like these clean t-shirts on you / I like the restaurants you choose.” On the swanky spoken-word “Imagine this”, they recount a first date, the boy’s desire at the girl’s surprising cleverness. But they go their separate ways even though the connection was strong: “And as the city turns quiet / You both have to admit / That this isn’t now / But this could’ve been it.”

Similar to Charli xcx, Smerz’ downtempo songs might be more revealing than their anthems. They cry and second-guess before the party on “But I do”, and a zap of realization comes on “A thousand lies”, where they bleakly sing, “I’m realizing lately that I won’t feel like this again.” The anxiety creeps in on “Easy”, the closing track, where their Tirzah-esque voices cut across the haze, daydreaming about closeness that might be harder to achieve. “I’ll be the one you know,” they assure, “We’ll talk about the things you don’t talk about with your friends,” matching a drunk promise that you know you won’t keep. Or maybe the person on the other side just isn’t into you, and there’s nothing you can do. The trip ends with the record’s most brilliant line, succinctly summarizing the whirlwind of a night out before the comedown of realization: “Have I said too much?”.

Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt create amazing music together. With Smerz, they have this incredible power and sound. The duo head to New Zealand and Australia soon before going to Ireland and Europe for some tour dates. There might not be much time to release new singles for a while. However, I am sure that we will hear something from them a bit later in the year. If this is the first time that you have heard of Smerz, then make sure that they are firmly…