SMERZ

The Oslo-based music duo stops by to tell us what they've been into.

July 2, 2025

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Smerz is an Oslo-based music duo consisting of Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt. Since their 2016 debut, they’ve released an EP and an album on XL Recordings, a choir piece, and a fictional pop star EP via their own label, Shopping. Their latest album, Big City Life, dropped May 23 on Copenhagen-based label Escho. Self-written, performed, recorded, and mixed, the project’s definitely worth checking out (especially if you’re into that cool, trip-hop-adjacent sound). Be sure to catch them on their upcoming EU/US tour this fall. Lucky for us, Smerz is here to tell us what they’ve been into.

WHAT Smerz IS INTO...

🌞

Your regular spot

Dozing off in the sun at your usual spot. This place is between our apartments in front of a church, with some big trees surrounding it. It should be a place you cultivate by going to regularly, should feel like home outside.

💿

Wild at Heart OST on CD

I recently inherited my grandfather’s CD player and bought this CD at random, not having seen the film. I ended up listening to it every day for several months. It has everything: Angelo Badalamenti’s suspicious chords, grand orchestral parts, Nicolas Cage doing Elvis covers. There is a special thrill to the music being stationary - I can’t listen to it other places because the album doesn’t exist online. My apartment has become this music and the other way around.

💔

Photographs of a life-size doll resembling Kokoschka’s ex-lover Alma Mahler

I saw these in a corner of the Leopold Museum in Vienna last week, after a friend recommended it. Kokoschka commissioned a life-size replica of his lost love, Alma Mahler, from the doll-maker Hermine Moos, based on detailed instructions

🌬️

Caterina Pascual Söderbaum’s Sonetten Om Andningen

This book transfers sensation through words. We found it through the Danish publisher Basilisk, I think it is available in Swedish, Spanish, and Danish.

💋

A snus at bedtime

A sensuous nightly ritual to finish off whatever you’ve started. It tickles, it crams, it lays you down.

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SMERZ

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