Molly Nilsson - Ordinary Synth-Pop

The borders are only lines in the sand

The borders are divided by land

And invented by men

The birds all fly high in the sky

But the birds have never heard

About Europe, about you

About Europe

Born in the mid-Eighties in Stockholm, Molly Nilsson would embark on a path in which the personal and the artistic remain incredibly intertwined. But not only that. The personal element that seeps through is neither a kind of star-worship nor the self-referential storytelling typical of much mainstream production, nor indeed of much independent production. The personal dimension that comes through in the Swede's work is about as ordinary, relatable and sincere as you can find out there. But Molly's compositions don't stop there, at an illusion of experience rendered in a transparent and self-contained way. Her vignettes are always wrapped in a dreamy, hazy aura, sometimes almost stunned, distilled by a perennially pitch-black outfit, crowned by a glacial platinum-blonde face, and yet never detached — if anything, it's easily pierced by emotions and insecurities, which dissolve into the confidential, casual manner of her many live shows. And this, fundamentally, is the difference with figures like Lana Del Rey, to whom she has often been compared as "the European, underground answer", whether due to their closeness in age or to the sporadic "dreamy" afterglow of their music. Where songwriters like Grant work from an idea of experience, however historically grounded, Nilsson does nothing more than draw from her own most ordinary biography to shape her hazy miniatures, in a rare exercise where the everyday becomes myth, without pretension and without showing off.

What kind of ordinary are we talking about, then, between a cadaverous synth and a brushed-out echo? The nomadism that's partly romanticized, partly forced by late-capitalist precarity. Being broke in gentrifying metropolises. Balcony parties with loose tobacco and discount wine. Europe as the reference unit for the concept of home. The experience photographed by Molly Nilsson isn't universal but extremely contingent, appealing and identifiable to anyone born, roughly, between the Eighties and the Nineties. And yet the confessional, intimately naive character of her lyrics, the timeless aesthetic emanating from her invariably lo-fi productions, blended with shamelessly eighties references, extend the Swede's appeal to anyone who resonates with these deeply melancholic frequencies.

Although anchored in many respects in the present, it's to some unspecified point in the Eighties that Molly Nilsson's music keeps pointing back. As if, following the autobiographical thread released in a non-linear way across the grooves of her discography, the energetic makeup stamped by her birth year were a recurring and inescapable element, despite the many spatio-temporal transformations. Cyndi Lauper, Saada Bonaire, Propaganda, Siouxsie, but also Cosey Fanni Tutti, The Space Lady, Anne Clark, Nine Circles and Jane Hudson emerge intermittently, transfigured and reshuffled, to the point of becoming individually unrecognizable yet detectable in a mood as vague as it is specific. It's a glossy retro-projection, then, one that is as much reproduction as spontaneous, spectral apparition. As such, it regenerates itself into mini-scenes that appear similar yet at the same time have potentially infinite configurations. The Swede's recording debut comes shortly after her move to Berlin.

Is the future any brighter?

Is the darkness any lighter in Europe?

I met Joy in London, she used to love to sing

But now she’s not singing about anything

"Gotta work to make your way

Better work if you wanna stay"

So now she's working for you, for Europe

In the early 2000s, the German capital was an unparalleled magnet for artists of every stripe. What had been known in previous decades as the Mecca of electronic avant-gardes, from the kraut aesthetic to techno, had in the meantime morphed into a seemingly bottomless container for architecture scenes, design, visual art and, needless to say, musical strands of every kind, animated by minds migrating in from everywhere. A contributing factor, as the Swede would often recall, was the city's open, forgiving climate, a web of situations and mindsets that is always "lenient with you, even if you should fail". A different atmosphere, for Nilsson, from the more rigid, peripheral Stockholm. More prosaically, moreover, Berlin simply allowed you to start something from nothing, within everyone's financial reach. That is, at least, until the speculative surge of the 2010s.

It's in this climate that, almost by chance, Molly ends up finishing what becomes her first album. These Things Take Time (2008) is a title that alludes, alternately, both to the gestation of the tracks, written and recorded over the span of several years while she held down an office job on the lower floors of a corporation, and to the necessarily long emotional recovery following a trauma, whether psychological or romantic.

There's an almost funereal atmosphere, in fact, running through the album's songs, to the point that many will rush to prematurely pigeonhole Nilsson as a "dark" figure, in the most primal and, ahem, eighties sense of the term. Entirely self-written and self-produced at home on a single cheap keyboard plugged into a computer, These Things Take Time introduces what will become the stylistic coordinates of all of Nilsson's future albums, while at the same time possessing a character and intensity all its own even within her discography. Its thirteen compositions, in fact, are among the barest and most stripped-down even by the minimal, essential standards of her later work.

"The Lonely" opens the set without much ceremony, with a mournful, looping synth nursery rhyme and an almost imperceptible dirty rhythm, over which Nilsson's equally subdued, frozen narration settles in. While the overall tone immediately locks into that Eighties feel mentioned above, the color of the Swede's voice and lyrics recalls an almost Nico-like solemnity. The comparison with the late German singer-songwriter is one she'll be saddled with time and again, much to her chagrin, since Molly has never considered the Velvet Underground muse a reference point, nor that particular brand of singer-songwriting something she especially champions. Still, the introspective, desolate lyrical content of tracks like "8000 Days" can't help but bring to mind the Cologne-born singer's grim madrigals, slimmed down into an even more lethargic, inert, glossy format.

Nilsson's vocal performances drift along as if trapped halfway between a sedated, post-acid state and an imploded emotional condition. They settle in always directly and proceed without much tonal variation over a seemingly desensitized modulation, seemingly more in tune with an early-model synth-pop performer than with confessional singer-songwriting. This quality is a hallmark of Nilsson's overall vocal aesthetic, but it's even more pronounced among the tracks of These Things Take Time. Yet exquisite pseudo-piano ballads like "Whiskey Sour", the secluded psychoanalytic observations made on the subway in "Joyride" and, above all, the moving nocturnal serenade of "Hey Moon" — a track that will remain among her best-known ever — only remind us that Molly Nilsson is exactly a figure caught between the two sensibilities, between icy synth entropy and the warmer, more insecure, vulnerable kind of singer-songwriting.

Despite excelling at the essential ballad format, it's the more rhythmic tracks — however bare and minimal they remain — that will dictate the more recognizable, and later more expansive, style of Molly Nilsson's music. Tracks that are nonetheless beautifully crafted, from the drunken "(Won't Somebody) Take Me Out Tonight", which in its gothic naivety reconciles, in a three-minute sketch, Annie Anxiety and Madonna, to the sketched-out bubblegum of "We've Never Coming Home", almost a reprise of the previous track.

Released on her self-founded Dark Skies Association – the label that would put out all of her subsequent work – These Things Take Time crystallizes a persona as shadowy as it is instantly iconic, one that would earn a sizeable following and cult status for an artist who rose to prominence entirely on her own, without sponsors or merchandising of any kind. The album picked up growing acclaim in the months following its release, arriving at a fortunate moment for lo-fi productions, so much so that most critics rather summarily filed it under that particularly fashionable hypnagogic strand of the late decade, alongside Ariel Pink and Hype Williams. Also contributing to her being pigeonholed in the shadow of the leading names of the lo-fi revival was the endorsement of John Maus, an artist who would also end up being the only name the otherwise always solitary Swede would ever collaborate with, and who, in retrospect, is also the figure closest in sound and mood to Nilsson's own aims. Two years later Maus himself would even cover/duet on "Hey Moon" on the acclaimed "We Must Become…", a release that would, for many, serve as their first encounter with the name Molly Nilsson.

The singer-songwriter then entered a highly prolific period, working at a pace of roughly one album a year. Her name had barely started to circulate when, in 2009, she released her second album, Europa. The record cements the Swede's aesthetic while also setting in motion a process of sonic maturation that would only be completed a couple of albums later. Shorter than her debut, Europa retains the minimal synth framework, reaffirmed by the lovely opener "In The Mood For A Tattoo", but extends its reach, however tentatively, toward catchier, vaguely "pop" territory. The three central tracks stand out above all the rest. "When I Have No Words" unfurls an almost danceable, nostalgic beat, "Berlin, Berlin" is a semi-liturgical dedication to the Central European city at the heart of the Europe evoked in the title, which flows, fittingly, into the breezier, more knowing title track, a cosmopolitan poem to the old continent, accompanied by a video (also, naturally, shot in lo-fi) filmed in a Baltic Sea port. The rest of the album, however, doesn't sustain the potential sparked by these songs, coasting along – pleasantly enough, but on tracks that are considerably less sharp and memorable.

Only a few months later came the follow-up, Follow The Light (2010). As the title suggests, Molly Nilsson seems to be gently moving toward a more open compositional and aesthetic direction, shaking off the overly narrow label of synth dark lady. While not too dissimilar from her earlier work, the lyrical content grows progressively more varied, and even a certain streak of dark humor begins to surface. Even more crucial will be the Swede's growing commitment to live performance, which starts to seep into her lyrics as well. Starting with Follow The Light, in fact, Nilsson's name begins to turn up, quite literally, everywhere. Her tours become some of the busiest of the period, with shows scheduled on an almost daily basis, mainly across the continent, her home turf and main stage, though she would soon go on to perform across the Americas, Asia and Australia – a rather bizarre outcome for a decidedly introverted, niche artist. But her concerts soon settle into the format that suits her best: small, smoky venues, often in cities far from the capitals favored by the concert business, stages set at eye level with the audience. Molly reliably performs dressed in black, "trying to disappear as much as possible", as she has wryly put it in interviews, interacts with the crowd, downs beers and shots as though the whole thing were a decadent house party. An ease that seems almost at odds with an otherwise reserved, reluctant-to-communicate personality – to this day, the interviews she's granted can be counted on one hand. "I'm just not good at talking", she has said. That's why thoughts, streams of consciousness, diary fragments, and random observations end up on record instead. Listening to a Molly album, then, is like running into a friend in the middle of the night for one last drink, philosophizing, commenting on some interesting guy spotted by the Chinese wholesaler, restating leftist truisms and eternal truths, or simply debating the decision to bleach your hair.

I love the city in the night

When she leaves on all her lights

When she tells me that she’s mine

I believe her every time

I’d never leave for the countryside

Small towns make me terrified

In the cities our hearts stay open like bars

I feel safe in the city. I feel safe in the city

Follow The Light perhaps lacks any real highlights, but the record makes clear that the Swede's approach has by now shifted toward a more singer-songwriter-oriented framework. The opener "The Closest We'll Ever Get To Heaven" is worthy of the most seasoned lyricists, "Never O' Clock" winks at the same time toward Sandra Lauer's sultry rhythms, while "Truth" and "I'm Still Wearing His Jacket" return to darker, more gothic tones. But the goth of Follow The Light is never an attempt to sketch out nihilism for its own sake. Underneath Nilsson's compositions there's always a glimmer of vitality and curiosity toward becoming, toward an immanent poetry to be caught in the small moments of the everyday.

Just a year later, and still in the midst of constant touring, History (2011) continues down this path, this time seriously raising the stakes. Although the album opens on a rather unconvincing note (the limp pace of "In Real Life"), the tracklist reveals some of the finest compositions in her entire catalog. Most notably, Nilsson's songwriting this time pushes into more overtly synth-pop and even new wave territory. "Hiroshima Street" is a gorgeous ballad that wraps New Order in a gust of Eastern European chill, "I Hope You Die", probably her best-known track from this period, hides behind that gore-ish title a moving synthetic love song, while "City of Atlantis" goes for a tempo more upbeat than ever before, paying its dues to John Foxx and Human League, but filtering it all through Nilsson's now-recognizable, deeply personal formula, right through to the touching, almost epic closer "Skybound". Weighing down History, however, are also a handful of less inspired tracks, from the dragging "The Bottles Of Tomorrow" to some clumsy instrumentals, confirming once again just how central the lyrical and vocal contribution is to Molly Nilsson's compositions. Still, the album firmly signals the maturity and complexity the Swede had by then achieved and, released not long after Maus's shout-out, it would also become the album of her (relative) media breakthrough, earning reviews in the outlets "that matter" and swelling her cult following.

It's therefore no bad thing that the pace at which Nilsson's work comes out slows down somewhat starting with History. Two years later, having in the meantime developed a passion for astrology and Chinese ideograms, she returns with The Travels (2013), an album that this time manages to strike a real balance between the more "song"-oriented side of her writing and the various shades of her lo-fi synth minimalism. The Travels is an ode to a liberating, resilient nomadism – albeit one still under Xanax. "Philadelphia", "City" and "Going Places" are little manifesto-songs for this black-clad, wandering philosophy that couldn't care less about the morning after, "The Power Ballad", among her most melodically accomplished tracks, is a sweet digression on the power of love versus the love of power, while the single "Dear Life" wraps it all up in a tipsy ode to life force (“Dear Life, you know I love you secretly/ even when you’re talking dirty to me/ (and I’m not only saying this cause I’m drunk)”). Sketches from a pen that's simple but sharp, vaguely restless yet always positive at its core (see the almost sunny closer "Out There"), lively in every one of its impressions, however you look at it. A more cohesive album with a stronger sense of the whole than its two predecessors, The Travels still isn't without its small flaws – "Omega" and "Atlantic Tales" slow the listen down at a crucial point in the record. But these are slips one forgives with affection: anyone who has ever found themselves wandering lost through the outskirts of some European capital at four in the morning won't have any trouble understanding and loving the blues of these synth-ballads, which by now make Molly Nilsson an essential name of the 2000s minimal scene.

It would be Zenith (2015), another two years on, that would literally close the orbit sketched out over the preceding five years. Thematically, the album picks up right where The Travels left off, with travel-as-movement as a necessary existential condition, and it does so with a brilliant bit of wit ("The Lonely Planet/ Is The Only Planet For Me"). The track floods its measured lyrical flow with a cathedral of typically Maus-like synths, but immediately after gives way to the hyper-Eighties stride of "1995". The song is spiced up by one of the album's key innovations, one that would be sporadically repeated in the Swede's compositions from here on: free-roaming sax lines, about as quintessentially eighties as anything you could find on the market. But "1995" is, above all, a brilliantly written song, starting with its lyrics – a wry reflection on fin de siecle anxiety at the dawn of the millennium, paired with a contradictory faith in the future, though always brought back to the personal ("Windows '95/ Is just a metaphor for what I feel inside").

The album continues at a consistently high level, managing to develop with greater care the relationship between retro-futurist sonic exploration and the need for lyrical expression. There's no shortage of more fully-formed, "traditional" songs (the atmospheric ballad "Lovers Are Losers"), but it's in the seemingly more sketched-out, spontaneous and open tracks that Molly Nilsson's pen seems most at ease and, ultimately, most effective: "Happyness" and "My Body" are the clearest examples. The record closes on the expansive, hopeful "Tomorrow", sealing what could well be considered the most representative album of the Swedish composer's sound and her poetry of the everyday.

In the midst of a live schedule that by now takes her to every corner of the world, she then released Single (2017), two tracks accompanied by a video for "About Somebody" that is about as Nilsson as it gets (a black-and-white clip of Molly excitedly showing us around her new rented Berlin apartment) and then the album Imaginations. The record adds little to what Zenith had already put on the table, but it still delivers some genuinely excellent moments and, overall, offers a sound more cohesive than ever before. "Let's Talk About Privileges" and "Not Today Satan" are superb existential ballads faithful to the Eighties-hypnagogic blueprint. Sax takes center stage again in the icy blues of "American Express" and in the excellent synthetic dancefloor number "Think Pink", which anchors a central stretch of the album in a state of grace. Imaginations finds Nilsson now perfectly at home in her role as synth-pop singer-songwriter, true to the aesthetic of her early work but no longer averse to groove and more winking arrangements.

A year later came 2020 (2018), an album that introduces more openly socio-political references into the lyrics. The sound confirms the richer solutions of the two previous works (this time vocally too, just listen to the opening of "Every Night Is New", or the unheard-of abrasiveness of "Serious Flowers") and unveils another more-than-decent ballad single ("A Slice of Lemon"). The world of 2020 is a reflection on faith in the future, born out of a close look at the billboards advertising the Tokyo Olympics that were supposed to be held, precisely, in the horrible year 2020. But there's no shortage, this time clearly confirmed by the twist in the story, of the typical ironic, bittersweet innuendo that Nilsson has pleasantly accustomed us to. However, the sonic universe unveiled on the album is enjoyable but less striking, weighed down once again by a not-entirely-necessary instrumental interlude ("My Mental Motorcycle"). The splendid "Days Of Dust" nonetheless lifts the listening experience with a thoroughly bouncy rock energy, crowned by a lovely video in which she's immortalized for the first time with a ginger bob haircut. 2020 shows a mature, versatile songwriter, open to brushing up against new territories. What's perhaps missing is the definitive album that would hand down to history the artistic completeness that the gentle giant of Stockholm has by now achieved.

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