With tracks fluent in strings and synths, you would think Norwegian duo Smerz were born reading sheet music and raised on lullabies of arpeggios, but when asked if they play many instruments, Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg reply almost simultaneously, “no, we play the computer”.

With the computer as their instrument, emotion is the software that their postmodern pop album, Big City Life, runs on. The project is a soundtrack of fragmented memories pieced together. “These feelings relate to the cities we wrote the album in – Oslo, Copenhagen and New York. Moving between these places gave us different ingredients to draw upon,” they explain. Created in these cities and filtered through laptops and screens, the album captures how we move through the world as both connected and isolated, always searching for something just out of reach.

The duo distil the liminality of long shadowy avenues, construction sites, flickering bar signs and overheard conversations into their 13-track release. Now reimagined further in their newly released remix project, Big City Life EDITS, that world is illustrated once more, with help from features including Clairo, Erika de Casier, ML Buch and experimental pop duo New York. With standout tracks like “You got time and I got money” and “Roll the Dice”, the project has been praised for soundtracking an emotion that lives within city life – it’s music for late-night trains, early-morning light and ambling down side streets.

Below, the duo guide us through five key inspirations that came to shape the original album.

WALKING DOWN THE STREET

Smerz: “When we listen back to some songs, they feel like explorations of memories, daydreaming or longing, things that often happen when you’re walking, especially if you do it without music or in spaces where you have room to think.

Sometimes when you walk, you feel like you have a persona – like a character you step into on your way somewhere. You’re alone, but still surrounded by people and things, and that mix creates your little world. It’s like when you forget your headphones and have to be with your thoughts. You might wander somewhere very different from where you are, or the place you’re in might inspire you to make up stories – maybe based on something true, something you want to happen or a mix of both.”

FEELINGS

Smerz: “Feelings are more clear on this album than ever before for us. Every song kind of captures an emotional situation from the past years. Some happened while the album was being made, others explored something that had already happened. We make these songs partly because they’re things that can’t easily be explained in words. Many of them carry a sense of longing – a gentle ache. Even if it’s a nice feeling, there’s still this sense that something’s missing, something you can’t quite pinpoint.”

There’s a feeling in the album of staring at the ceiling while lying in bed

WATCHING MOVIES

Smerz: “We love the way movies show perspective – how a camera always captures something from a particular angle. That way of seeing has inspired us, especially on the track Imagine This, where the perspective feels more literal.

We realised this afterward, as we’d both started watching a lot more movies, and it became a big part of our daily lives. Some songs ended up written from an unspecified perspective – not exactly us, but close – like looking at yourself from a certain angle. We wonder if that’s because of all the movies we’ve watched, like having an internal camera capturing what you think is going on.

And it’s kind of like: this is the city. Here are the characters. This is the building. Then you zoom in, and you see them moving around, trying to figure some things out. It’s romantic, but also a bit humorous. Big themes, but also everyday moments.”

MAKING MUSIC IN BED

Smerz: “There’s a feeling in the album of staring at the ceiling while lying in bed. I like to be a bit switched off when making music – not always thinking too hard. You can make music on your computer anywhere, and that feels like a luxury. You’re not at work, maybe a little disconnected or exhausted, but you’re still making music. That tiredness changes what comes out.”

PLUG-INS

Smerz: “Spitfire Labs is this plugin we got around the time we started making the album. It just lets us mix real instruments. So we used it a lot to create almost an artificial band, and with this band creating melodies and drums as if you are in rehearsal. In our earlier music, we used the computer to make sounds you couldn’t play on real instruments. But this time, even though it’s still made on a computer, we tried to make something that sounds like real instruments. Sometimes we went to this page called pianochord.org where you can look at one chord and then see suggestions for something similar, and we played around there.”