Smerz - 12.04.26 - Gaîté Lyrique

The Norwegian electronic duo carried plenty of anticipation into their live set off the back of, Big city life, though the expectations may have simply been too much to live up to.

The Gaîté Lyrique was a good fit as a venue. It carries a certain young but high-class modernist edge. The main concert hall sits opposite the bar, essentially a big reflective box accessed through heavy-duty doors. After collecting a well-concocted tequila soda, I made my way in to find the space already packed with stylish 20-and-early-30-somethings. Dark, with a strong red light washing its sides, the room had a clublike enchantment to it.

The stage was backed by a massive projection wall showing ambiguous blue dots, almost like tiny diamonds floating in darkness. When Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt took the stage, the crowd went into a tamed frenzy. In her statement red dress, Catharina instantly set the scene by stepping in front of a windblower, her hair becoming weightless, evoking a modern Marilyn Monroe, the hot city girl who happens onto a windy subway grating.

The projection then shifted to a tilted, out-of-focus close-up of her black heels, and it became clear this was a live recording of the show itself. As a duo known for blending R&B, techno, footwork, trip-hop, electroclash, even K-pop with their collaboration with NewJeans, they sought to extend that boundary-pushing into the creative direction of their live performance. Where you would expect conventional live videography to follow the artist (mid-shot, in focus, centre-framed), this was its deliberate opposite: too zoomed in, out of focus, angled, slow to follow the action. The best way I can describe it is a videographer performing intoxication. It paired well with the themes of party-life girlhood running through Big City Life, and it was clearly what most people reacted to: phones out, zooming into the projection. A perfect representation of youthful blasé. But it grew repetitive, and a visual conceit alone can't carry a full show, especially when everything else was bringing it down.

The biggest impediment was a confused crowd. The y2k, McBling dress-code, the drinks held with a certain confidence, who cheered at the expected moments but never quite let go. The kind of audience that wants to be seen appreciating something rather than simply enjoying it. When the duo moved into some of their more recognisable songs such as “Feisty”, the energy surged and then died within fifteen seconds, as though sustaining enthusiasm might have seemed too eager. What followed felt disorganised, and the crowd's mood, somewhere between detached irony and genuine uncertainty about how to respond, only amplified the confusion. If the aim of the live set was to evoke Lynchian ideas of presenting something beautiful with an uglier truth beneath it (e.g. feminine beauty within an urban context but the underlying isolation and confusion that comes with it reinforced by the odd camera framings and positions), it went over people’s heads who were present to just have a good time. 

The vocal mix didn’t help: loud but strangely unanchored, not punching through the instrumental layers, nor blending into them, but hovering somewhere beside them, like a conversation happening in a separate room. In practice, it meant the melodies felt decoupled from the rhythms underneath, robbing each song of the tension and release that makes Smerz's recorded work so compelling. Whether this was a deliberate mixing choice or simply a technical failure was hard to tell.

The duo's dynamic also suffered on stage in a way it never does on record. Catharina commanded the space with her magnetic stage presence, but Henriette seemed uncomfortable stepping forward, visibly reluctant each time she was put under the spotlight. On record, their voices and sensibilities towards each other and to the themes they explore in their music feel genuinely intertwined. Live, it felt like one of them wanted to be there and the other was enduring it, and the chemistry that defines their best work evaporated.

It's a shame, because Smerz's releases, including Big city life and Allina, and even their monthly NTS shows, have been genuinely interesting in their exploration of various genres from classical to leftfield techno, tracks that are experimental yet digestible, often even danceably upbeat. On record, Smerz is a duo that knows exactly how far to push before pulling you back in. Live, that instinct seemed to desert them entirely.

The show felt like wasted potential. It was dominated by floaty lullabies that sounded pleasant enough but could barely be understood, an experimental streak too uncommitted for the audience to know how to listen, move, or feel. You could argue the show was trying to recreate that specific feeling of being tipsy and convinced you're doing amazingly, only to look back the next morning and realise you were just being messy. Maybe that was the point.