{"id":290600,"date":"2025-11-14T06:24:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T06:24:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/290600\/"},"modified":"2025-11-14T06:24:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T06:24:07","slug":"smerz-big-city-life-edits-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/290600\/","title":{"rendered":"Smerz: Big city life EDITS Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those silhouettes on the cover of Big city life<\/a>? That\u2019s you and me! Smerz<\/a>\u2019s latest and best album feels like it was made for projection. It\u2019s not designed to be relatable, that most cursed descriptor of meaningless contemporary pop, but to be lived in, tailored to your body, snagged on the pedal of a Lime bike. In that sense, it lends itself fabulously to a remix album, and so arrives Big city life EDITS, an album of sinuous reinterpretations that highlights the endless plasticity of Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt\u2019s voices and songwriting.<\/p>\n

Across these 14 reworks, 18 acts write artful Smerz fan fiction: For the most part, the duo\u2019s voices are left intact, but layered atop sounds far removed from the original record\u2019s arch, deconstructed take on dance music. On Molina<\/a>\u2019s discomfitingly sexy version of \u201cRoll the dice,\u201d Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt seem to have taken a wrong turn off the high street and into one of those crusty dive bars that only plays hypnotic European dub; the song\u2019s lyrics, so embodied and affirmative on the original, suddenly feel ominous, like you\u2019re being lured somewhere you\u2019re not supposed to be. The arty electroclash duo New York<\/a> turn \u201cImagine this\u201d into something that might have fit on After Dark 2<\/a>, striking a perfect balance between high kitsch and high glamour.<\/p>\n

If it can sometimes feel like \u201calternative\u201d pop is simply real pop music that\u2019s kind of unfinished\u2014like, music that uses avant-garde texture or structure to hide a dearth of coherent ideas\u2014Big city life EDITS proves that Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt\u2019s songs have strong bones. The Copenhagen singer Fine<\/a> plays \u201cA thousand lies\u201d straight: It\u2019s just her voice atop a loose, jazz-folk arrangement, and it sounds like a lost cut from the Norman Fucking Rockwell!<\/a> sessions. It\u2019s not the only song on EDITS that conjures the spirit of Lana<\/a> straight from the Bayou: On a rework of \u201cYou got time and I got money,\u201d by Vilhelm Strange, Villads Tyrrestrup, Tobias Hansen, Zack Sekoff, and Jakob Littauer\u2014credited here as VVTZJ\u2014Clairo<\/a> is a dead ringer for the singer circa Ultraviolence<\/a>, warbling over an impossibly luxurious soul arrangement like a lounge singer playing her last show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Those silhouettes on the cover of Big city life? That\u2019s you and me! Smerz\u2019s latest and best album…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290601,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[776,88,216,777],"class_list":{"0":"post-290600","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}