Hailed as one of the year’s most outstanding releases, Smerz’s latest album “Big city life” feels less like a record and more like a state of mind. With it, the Norwegian duo Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt have captured the city as a promise. A promise of becoming someone else, of falling in love, of dancing through the night just to escape the weight of the ordinary. It’s postmodern and minimalistic in its production but deeply human in its core: ironic and cool on the surface, quietly tender underneath. They move through their songs with a rare kind of empathy, observant to the small emotions that bind people together in shared rooms, shared streets and shared moments. Sonically, the album drifts between trip-hop haze, classical influences, and the kind of club music that plays after the rush has passed. There’s a particular kind of confidence here, a refusal to overstate its own brilliance, the kind of record that understands that true coolness never announces itself. This summer at Way Out West, Smerz will bring that vision to the stage.