It took several years before Swedish Molly Nilsson became aware of her musical talent, but thanks to Youtube she was discovered in record speed. Read more about the Swedish Youtube star.
The Swedish singer-songwriter Molly Nilsson was born in Stockholm in 1984. Molly began her creative pursuits in comics and writing but began experimenting with a friend’s keyboard. Then she transitioned from visual media into songwriting. “Songwriting enabled me to do what I love the most, which is daydreaming,” she says.
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Her daydreaming, then, seems to be a way to exist outside of the channels that capital sends us down; a mental agility that also allows her to see loneliness as joy, or the banal as magical.
She moved to Berlin in 2005, launched her first record, “These Things Take Time” in 2008 and founded her independent record label, Dark Skies Association in 2009, on which she released the album Europa. After releasing another album in 2015, Zenith, Nilsson began touring the world.
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On a tour in 2017, she got stranded at the airport in Tokyo. There were big signs on the walls that read “2020,” posted in anticipation of Japan’s summer Olympics. She realized that 2020 was going to be a leap year and the number crept into her dreams.
With her utopian outlook and determination to find magic in the everyday, the fiercely independent Swede swims against the tide. Her album Twenty Twenty, her eighth, was released in November 2018. It was as usual recorded in her own Lighthouse Studios in Berlin. Her records always contain snippets of her life — flying over Greenland, chain-smoking, getting a whiskey sour spilled on her at a party, remembering Windows 95 — and the anxieties and appetites that accompany them.
On Twenty-Twenty, she’s more concerned than ever with what those fragments expose, what it means to try to figure out who you are right now. She made self-discovery in 2018, sounding ominous and fun and painful at once.
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Nilsson’s style features minimalist arrangements of synthesizers and drum beats and is often categorized as dark pop or lo-fi synth-pop. The last track on Twenty Twenty is “Blinded By The Night” and the record’s most haunting one. It is steeped with ideas of selfhood and the passage of time. Pretending she is a tree, she sings, “You can count my rings after I fall and still not know a thing about me.” She sings of late nights at homey bars and notes that every star is “unaware how dark their surroundings are.”
Feature image (on top): From 2020
The Swedish Youtube Star, written by Tor Kjolberg