She is her own manager, books her own tours, has never had a publicist. Her latest album features a song about communism in the style of Madonna’s “Vogue.” 'I felt like I don’t need to lure people in—I’m just going to call it ‘Un-American Activities’
Molly Nilsson in Berlin. “I always had to kind of lure people in and be like, ‘Come listen to my music, and while you’re here, I’ll tell you something,’” Nilsson said. “With this album, I felt like I don’t need to lure people in.”, Photo credit: Gordon Welters for The New York Times
Nothing in this world is certain except death and taxes, and Molly Nilsson writes songs about both.
The Swedish-born singer began her career making hazy synth-pop tracks, with titles like “More Certain Than Death” and “I Hope You Die,” that suggested love and mortality were always intertwined. But, over the past decade, politics has increasingly shaded her work: A Nilsson record might be the only place where references to late capitalism and the trickle-down economy feel perfectly at home in a pop song. Her latest album “Un-American Activities” features a song about communism that’s also a hommage to Madonna’s “Vogue.”
“I’m writing the kind of music that I want to listen to myself,” Nilsson said recently in a video interview from Berlin, where she lives.
Over her 16-year career, Nilsson, 39, has established a cult following while working outside the music industry’s norms. She is her own manager, books her own tours and has never hired a publicist. For years, she pressed her own records and hawked them around record stores herself.
“The industry needs you a lot more than you need it,” she said. “I’m kind of bulletproof,” she added, “because even if I fail at what I’m doing, at least I did it.”
In Berlin, Nilsson said she felt “liberated by the fact that you didn’t have to be a musician to make music, you didn’t have to be living off your paintings to call yourself an artist.” (Credit: Gordon Welters for The New York Times)
“Un-American Activities,” released this month, is Nilsson’s most nakedly political record yet: an album-length exploration of McCarthyist blacklisting that draws lines between what Nilsson called “the persecution of leftists and socialists” in the ’40s and ’50s and the rise of the far-right today.
“A lot of young people maybe ask themselves ‘How did we end up where we are today?’ And for me it’s very clear,” she said.
This political consciousness has its roots in Nilsson’s childhood. Her postal worker father and her mother, who worked for Ikea, were both trade unionists, and Nilsson recalled attending marches with them. As a teen, she formed a band with friends, funded by a stipend from the Swedish government.
After graduating high school, Nilsson thought she wanted to become an illustrator, and had heard that Berlin was “the city where artists live, the way New York was in the ’70s.” When she arrived there in 2003, she said she felt “liberated by the fact that you didn’t have to be a musician to make music, you didn’t have to be living off your paintings to call yourself an artist.”
A year later, Nilsson accidentally became pregnant. Getting an abortion “was a dreadful experience,” she said, but afterward, she had “this feeling like I reclaimed my life.” She began making laconic, spartan synth tracks about lonely parties and forlorn romances on a keyboard she found in her rented apartment.
Her favorites ended up on “These Things Take Time,” a compilation CD she burned and sold herself. From then, she began self-releasing albums at a yearly clip through her one-woman record label Dark Skies Association, while she did odd jobs — working the coat check at the techno club Berghain, or selling sandwiches at a market — to fund her art.
The 2011 release of her fourth album, “History,” was a turning point, and gig bookers started emailing. “I suddenly had a tour,” Nilsson said. She took time off from her job as a guard at an art gallery, but never went back. “I had the feeling like, ‘This is temporary,’” she said. “And then the years pass, and people still want to hear me sing.”
“I had the feeling like, ‘This is temporary,’” Nilsson said. “And then the years pass, and people still want to hear me sing.” (Credit: Gordon Welters for The New York Times)
Although Nilsson has turned down offers from managers and labels, she has accepted support from like-minded industry people, like Michael Kasparis, whom she met in 2010 after dropping off some of her records at a London record store where he worked as a buyer. They became friends and Kasparis began helping distribute Nilsson’s albums through his fledgling indie label, Night School.
Forging a friendship with Kasparis, Nilsson said, has made her even more resistant to the idea of signing to a label and determined to wreak a “vengeance on the music industry.” She said she loves “sharing the work, but also sharing the enthusiasm — having a partner in crime and being like, ‘OK, we’re taking on the world now.’”
Nilsson has “a very complete sense of who she is, and how to do things,” Kasparis said: “She hasn’t done anything to get bigger — the quality of her music reaches people organically.” That meant she had “turned down a lot of big ticket stuff,” he added, including “commercial tie-ins and soundtrack stuff.”
But that also meant she was free to take risks, like her 2022 album “Extreme,” a metal-influenced detour about love and power, or “Un-American Activities,” which no longer couches Nilsson’s politics in stories of love and empowerment.
“On previous albums, I always had to kind of lure people in and be like, ‘Come listen to my music, and while you’re here, I’ll tell you something,’” she said. “With this album, I felt like I don’t need to lure people in — I’m just going to call it ‘Un-American Activities,’ I’m going to have a song called ‘The Communist Party.’ It’s quite clear and open — I don’t have to hide anything.”
[Shaad D'Souza is a freelance writer, editor and creative consultant based in London. He is music critic at the Saturday Paper, new music columnist at PAPER Magazine previously australia & new zealand editor at Noisey (VICE) contributing editor at the FADER acting deputy music editor at the Guardian bylines in Vulture, Bon Appetit, Pitchfork, PAPER, The Guardian, Billboard, Frieze, Vault, i-D and more copywriting and consulting clients include Warner, Universal, Sony, BMG, Beggars, Spotify and others.]
