Feel the city, roll the dice

Taken from the winter 25 issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here.

When you move to the big city, you go to bars on Friday nights to knock back drinks and spill them on wonky tables. You go to clubs and chain-smoke on the terrace and kiss someone in the back left corner of the dancefloor. You see some friends or to a gig, and you don’t wear the right shoes but the blisters are worth it. Your options are endless and who you are, or who you could be, stretches out in front of you: unfathomable, terrifying and endlessly exciting.

Few musicians have expressed this fantasy as artfully as Smerz, the experimental Norwegian duo of Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt. It’s as if they managed to bottle the humming frisson of young urban womanhood and pour it into their second studio album, Big City Life.

You hear it in the self-assured strut of Roll the dice, the knowing wink of the deadpan club anthem Feisty, and the lovestruck elegance of You got time and I got money – what might be 2025’s most beautiful ballad.

While Smerz were busy travelling the world to tour the album, transfixing audiences with a telepathically aligned stage show, they also released Big City Life EDITS. Further expanding their sonic universe, the new record features remixes by FACE cover star Clairo, lo-fi rapper MIKE and art-pop duo New York, as well as an assortment of Scandi cool kids: Erika de Casier, ML Buch, Clarissa Connelly, Astrid Sonne and Molina (like Henriette, all alumni of Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory).

During a short gap in the Big City Life tour, the morning after DJing at an after party for cult label August Barron’s SS26 show, Catharina and Henriette joined us to talk style icons, pesto pasta and the inspiration behind the year’s chicest album.

Other than music, what inspired Big City Life?

Catharina: Falling in love, Oslo, New York, going out, flirting, walking, being alone. Reading, especially Ann Quin, Louise Glück, Clarice Lispector, Alice Notley, Annie Ernaux and Ingeborg Bachmann. Watching movies; seeing stories told from a third-person perspective through the camera lens, observing people and their surroundings. I think we absorbed that way of storytelling – looking at a memory from different angles, zooming in and out.

Who’s your style icon?

Henriette: Sam Fox in Better Things [portrayed by Pamela Adlon, the mum of this very issue’s cover star, Odessa A’zion, would you believe].

Which fashion designers are inspiring you right now?

Catharina: I’m inspired by the work of our friends and collaborators, Bror August Vestbø and Benjamin Barron [the founders of August Barron ].

I like that their world feels open ended: both sincere and playful, romantic and sharp. Life is made up of so many different modes, so I enjoy it when clothes and music can embody a big mix of things.

Do you collect anything?

Catharina: I collect books. Inspired by my grandmother, Karin, I began making notes and comments in them, highlighting passages I wanted to remember. My bookshelf has become a kind of diary, documenting the things I’ve read and the sentences that evoked something in me at different times.

Henriette: I only collect things by mistake, like old receipts in my purse, lipsticks that don’t suit me, packs of noodles and shower gels.

What’s a song that brings you to tears?

Catharina: The last time I cried while listening to a song was Introduction et Allegro by Maurice Ravel, performed by the Norwegian harpist Ellen Bødtker. I was sitting in the back seat of a car. The song brings out a certain kind of sadness in me – light, not heavy. Like biking past an old apartment.

Henriette: Linger by The Cranberries. It has this kind of unsentimental and straightforward, almost cheerful, mood, with a big open sorrow underneath.

Describe the perfect afterparty for a Smerz show…

Henriette: A bar that we get invited to by someone in the audience.

What do you sing at karaoke?

Catharina: Susie Q by Creedence Clearwater Revival. It reminds me of my dad singing loudly in the car, driving home from dance class.

Henriette: I sing It’s All Coming Back To Me Now by Celine Dion, or My Humps by Black Eyed Peas.

What’s your advice for life in the big city?

Henriette: Walk to the store, buy a packet of gum and a bag of chips, take a piece of the gum in your mouth, walk firmly down the street, don’t look up at the window where you used to live, don’t say a word to anyone. When a day feels too broad, I put on my hat and walk down the street, watching my feet on black asphalt and occasional white stripes. I walk to the store and stand still for a long time, wondering beneath the hat what I will have for dinner. Then I move slowly past the shelves. The hat makes my arms longer and the groceries further away. The hat makes my feet glide and my thoughts dim. The hat makes my agenda unclear to myself and my surroundings. To them, I could be anyone. To me, I could be anywhere. Sometimes I get a call and don’t answer, it’s too much with the hat and the store to add a third place. The hat often ends in unfinished business, or something really simple like pasta with pesto.

HAIR Olivier Noraz at Artlist MAKEUP Masae Ito at MA+ World Group SET DESIGNER Isabella Furness PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT Leander STYLIST’S ASSISTANTS Amilia Howells and Gemma Baguley SET DESIGNER’S ASSISTANT Suzanne Elven