Smerz – You Got Time and I Got Money

You got song suggestions and we got blurbs! Readers’ Week 2025 gets started with a song from Juan…

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[7.38]Claire Davidson: “You Got Time and I Got Money” is a simple song, one that’s almost old-fashioned: Catharina Stoltenberg, with her placid but affectionate alto, persuades a partner into spending the evening together, her vocals’ careful pace keeping time with a laconic bassline and drumset. There’s a sweetness to the track’s low-key courtship, complete with a string interlude that recalls a more deliberate “Bittersweet Symphony” (a comparison I am not the first to make), but at four and a half minutes, the song is missing either a greater crescendo or a deeper lyrical intimacy beyond just cursory compliments toward the guy’s fashion sense. It’s pleasant, but hardly evocative of the heady romanticism its lyrics provide.
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Nortey Dowuona: There’s a tenderness to Smerz’s voice, and when I speak of tenderness, I speak of the strength it takes to lift your friend up to slip a pillow underneath their temples without waking them up; the patience to teach your child to tie their shoelaces; the cool to let something lie. Many singers with soft and pillowy voices will render themselves thin and reedy (e.g., Norah Jones) or weak and airy (e.g, Sabrina Claudio), but Smerz allows her voice the grace to not be buried in the hastily piled-on overdubs. Instead, it carries you along with the current and settling your stomach and belly. The lyrics are also winsome but plain, not wry turns of phrase meant for sneering unpacking or dewy-eyed equivalents of Hallmark cards made by robots. They’re meant to remind you of what he wears every time he snuggles with your son on the couch, the ribald jokes he cracks with his sister while his brother is falling off the sofa, that cool Chinese place only 20 minutes from your house which makes this fantastic bean curd you both tried while bored and now try to cook yourselves, then wake up on the couch with the plate dry and empty and your son napping at your feet. It reminds you of why love is so bountifully written about, due to the frank assessment that for many, this is all they ever truly wanted.
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Alfred Soto: Coming across as a Miami bass album as recorded by Black Box Recorder, Smerz’s album, with its discrete keyboard tunelets, charmed and annoyed me. They can’t be bothered to get worked up about sex, though, and that’s cool. “You Got Time and I Got Money” might’ve dropped in 1995 — dig the strings and the chillwave synth. The narcoleptic effect works.
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Ian Mathers: The more upbeat songs on the Smerz record hit me kind of oddly; I kept sensing that if this record had come out when I was undergrad in the early/mid 00s it would not only have fit in just fine but that it would have been a favourite, but in 2025… it just made me want to listen to other records from that time in my life instead. But that also meant I overlooked this low key, hazy gem, and in isolation I find I’m appreciating it much more.
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Will Adams: Big City Life fell off hard for me. Revisiting it for my year-end list-making, I missed the spark of 2024’s Allina EP and the weirdness of 2021’s Believer and instead got bogged down in the disaffected vocals and keyboard-preset instrumentation. “You Got Time and I Got Money” is one of the prettier tracks — its gentle sway and chord progression resemble this gorgeous Boards of Canada remix — but it’s also the longest. It brings to mind an extended slow dance that goes from romantic to awkward as the music drags into the fourth minute.
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Andrew Karpan: The ‘Bittersweet Symphony” riff is, itself, like a shining obelisk of money, a cursed monkey’s paw wrapped in lace; hearing the daughter of the current Norwegian finance minister gamely scat over it, in turn, gives, the record a kind of haunted, strangled dignity, like the heroine of a mid-career Sofia Coppola movie. Which is to say that I find myself wanting to hate this whole bit far more than I did; there’s nothing wrong with this; in some conceptual sense, the zoomer answer to Orgy’s cover of “Blue Monday.”
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Julian Axelrod: The wonky Norwegian pop of Big City Life is designed to keep listeners at arm’s length, but “You got time and I got money” is the moment Smerz feel close enough to touch. The track lopes like “Bitter Sweet Symphony” on a 50 mg edible, but there’s a stark emotional clarity that feels less transactional than the title suggests. Don’t be surprised when you hear this song as the first dance of the coolest couple you know.
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Juan Carlos Sahli: The texture (and the visuals) for “You Got Time and I Got Money” give out cam-corded drunken karaoke, but don’t mistake what Smerz are going for as blasé. Although the easiest association is in fact Geneva Jacuzzi covers “2 Become 1,” the “Bittersweet Symphony” strings and molten trip-hop beat seem as sincere as their request to see the man naked. Some moments require cheap backdrops; to make it count.
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