Big city life

The Norwegian art-pop duo (Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg) met in high school in their hometown of Oslo, then moved to Copenhagen for school—in Motzfeldt’s case, the Rhythmic Music Conservatory, the incubator for some of the most forward-thinking pop music of the 2020s, from Erika de Casier to ML Buch. Since their 2016 debut EP <i>Okey</i>, the pair have entered into something of a creative mind-meld, occasionally writing songs from one another’s perspectives. On <i>Big city life</i>, their second studio album (following 2021’s <i>Believer</i>), Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg swagger through the cityscape of their own cheeky fantasies, a flirty neon pleasure dome where anything can happen.

On “Roll the dice” and “Feisty,” they spit cool, campy bars about making friends in crowded bathroom lines and drunk taxi rides: “’Cause you’re a girl in the city/You just know how it is/You’re a professional, logistics, you just know this business,” they hype themselves up over a minimal drum-synth-piano riff. “You got time and I got money,” with its playfully swooning lyrics and sweeping string arrangements, plays out like the last karaoke number of the night.

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