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SMERZ
Debut album
‘BELIEVER’
out now

+ Announce Bandcamp Live Stream

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Praise for BELIEVER

“The appealingly unpredictable debut from the Norwegian duo thrives off the dueling forces of unease and temptation.” – Pitchfork, 7.7

“Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt have created a sonic topography that thrives on paradox – it’s a disorienting pleasure to navigate.” – Line Of Best Fit 8/10

“nocturnal music for dancefloor introverts” – CRACK

“Scandinavian polymaths that delivers a welcome reminder of music’s endless capacity to surprise and delight.” – Music OMH

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Norwegian duo Smerz release their debut album Believer  via XL Recordings / Remote Control. The announcement is accompanied by a music video for ‘Flashing’.

Smerz (Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt) cultivate their electronic pop sound further with ‘Flashing’, a track based around a 90s style euro-dance hook. Directed by Benjamin Barron and with a costume by Bror August, ‘Flashing’ is the fourth video for Smerz from the creative pair, who also worked together on the artwork for the record.

Smerz invite you on a journey from Rome to Oslo, from the baroque through modernism, the early 2000s and into the future, via a live stream performance that’ll air on their Bandcamp HERE. Recorded at Ultima Festival, Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene, Oslo Norway, September 14th 2020. The stream will start on Sunday, 21st March 2021 at 8.00am AEDT.

Listen / Download Believer: HERE

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Smerz’s upcoming full-length debut, Believer, begins with cascading chimes that almost sound as if they were plucked straight from a fairy tale. A slow and steady riff from a bass guitar then rings out, sounding as much like an acoustic instrument as it does a computer program attempting to mimic a guitar’s organic resonance. Even in the first few seconds of Believer, Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg bring the innovative spirit of their adopted Copenhagen to bear on their past, one that’s marked by adolescent choir practices and dance rehearsals in their native Oslo, winter vacations spent in small cabins nestled in the vast, untouched landscapes of the Norwegian countryside, and an innate belief in collective responsibility. 

Smerz bring Believer to life with the help of Benjamin Barron and Bror August, who respectively directed and styled the series of interconnected visuals that will accompany the album. They’ll render opulent Norwegian folk traditions, like the communal hallingdansen that centers on polyrhythms, and the lush landscapes of the Norwegian countryside in the painterly style of filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s mise-en-scènes while drawing on the minimalist staging of Lars von Trier’s Dogville, where your imagination fills in an entire set of visual associations around just the outline of a gooseberry bush on stage. “Each scene is a picture in a way, but it’s alive and hopefully there’s this glimpse into a world and a bigger narrative,” Stoltenberg says. It’s a world that tows the line between reality and dreams, and one that’s steeped in the nostalgia and romanticism of Norway’s cultural and artistic history.

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The world that Smerz build out with Believer isn’t necessarily a straight interpretation of their shared cultural heritage or their past. By using the intimate conversations of their friendship as foundational material, Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg nimbly dance around cultural expectations, whether it be in Norway or more broadly. It’s a disposition that almost mirrors the way that they produced the album—they actively worked to integrate classical music’s freer sense of timing into their computer-based process, trying to create something within the standard grids of music softwares that felt less rigid and more alive. In Norway, as in many other places, there’s the feminist ideal of a strong, independent woman, one who can stand up for herself and make her own choices. “We should never demand from each and every one of us to be confident, strong, and free; we need to work for structures, whether it’s inside our friend group or in the political system, where it is easier to be yourself and think freely regarding your own dreams, body, love life, future and so on. This distinction between structural and individual responsibility is crucial when talking about feminism and the classical idea of an independent woman anno 2020,” Stoltenberg says.

Motzfeldt has been studying music composition at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen and Stoltenberg has been enrolled in a masters mathematics program—they’re both close to finishing their respective degrees—and the two academic pursuits each bring something different to their creative processes. Motzfeldt’s academic compositions combine different genre prototypes to create something new, a process that fluidly complements the way the duo work together as Smerz. For Stoltenberg, coming up with mathematical proofs has made her more comfortable with searching for the unknown, which is something that she can apply to almost every aspect of her life. In spite of their intellectual pursuits, Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg’s collaboration sidesteps analytical processes in favour of spontaneity, randomness, and intuition. 

With Believer, which Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg starting working on three years ago, they formalise the boundless sonic world that started to emerge within each NTS show: these new songs seamlessly weave together techniques and sounds pulled from chamber and classical music, hip hop, R&B, and trance, but the end product is something altogether uncanny. Working mostly on their computer, their main instrument, Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg search for something new in well-known tropes, playing with the tension between the computer’s ability to render a spectrum of sounds ranging from the organic to the wholly unnatural. “There’s this hierarchy between different styles and what is expected of different genres, but we wanted to keep them all together in this flat hierarchy to show their different potentials and abilities,” Motzfeldt says. They transplanted a classical musician’s approach to the MIDI keyboard, leaning into the plastic-sounding effects that a computer imposes on string and harp samples. “You won’t end up in the same place as a symphony, where everything sounds alive, but you’ll end up in this new place in between,” Stoltenberg says.

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Smerz – Believer is out now via
XL Recordings / Remote Control.

Smerz – Believer

1. Gitarriff
2. Max
3. Believer
4. Versace strings
5. Rain
6. 4 temaer
7. Hester
8. Flashing
9. The favourite
10. Rap interlude
11. Sonette
12. Glassbord
13. Grand piano
14. Missy
15. I don’t talk about that much
16. Hva hvis

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AMNPLIFY – DB