Norway’s Smerz return with two new songs, shared in the form of a trailer for an as-yet-unannounced project known as Believer. The visual takes shape around the songs ‘The favourite‘ and ‘Rap interlude‘, a taster for a forthcoming body of work that pushes Smerz far beyond their previous releases.
The duo of Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg decamped for a time from Copenhagen (where they cut their teeth in the city’s vibrant live music scene) to Oslo in their native Norway. Now splitting their time between the two cities, the move helped replace Copenhagen’s night crawler spirit that permeates their earlier EPs Okey and Have fun with something more feral and unhinged.
This can be understood easily when you hear ‘The favourite’. Motzfeldt’s vocals reach an opera singer’s range (a testament to her years of singing in choir when she was younger) while Stoltenberg plays some grand and stately strings on the computer. Smerz’ sound looks into the future through the prism of the past, in a distinctly Norwegian version of retrofuturism.
The trailer for ‘The favourite/rap Interlude’, written, directed and produced by Benjamin Barron with costumes by Bror August, visualizes these nostalgic influences and the result is Smerz’ distinctly modern take on the traditional ideologies that make up Norwegian life.
