Molly Nilsson - Europa - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

2017 . Since 2015's Zenith, Berlin-based songwriter Molly Nilsson has surrendered to the world, traveling from Mexico to Glasgow, observing the changing socio-political landscape and imagining a better world. For an artist who has so successfully created her own environment and gradually let others in, her eighth studio album Imaginations sees Nilsson directly engaging with her surroundings, engendering change and allowing love in. Imaginations dreams big, recasting storming, stadium-sized pop into the internal language of the solo auteur. Imaginations is not escapism, it's a kaleidoscope and an alternative view, an agent of change. On Imaginations Molly is recasting her interior monologue as a prism through which to see the world, a means to live differently and to reject the status quo. We can Think Pink, change our destiny together. This is an optimism about the future when we need it the most. InchNew boys, new girls... give me your smile and I'll give you mine.Inch Clearly, we are living through a transformation but with alchemists like Molly Nilsson, we're never alone in the process.

Extreme is Molly Nilsson's tenth studio album. Recorded in 2019 and throughout the 2020 global pandemic at home in Berlin, it is a departure for Nilsson, an explosion of angry love. It's an album of anthems for the jilted generation, soaked with joy and offering solace, bristling with distorted, metal guitars and planet-sized choruses that bring light to the dark centre of the galaxy. It's an album of the times, by the times and for the people. It's a record about power. About how to fight it, how to take it and how to share it.Every song here is a gleaming gem in a pouch of jewels. Examples include InchKids Today,Inch where Nilsson is the voice of wisdom, archly commenting on the eternal struggle between youth and authority. InchThey Will PayInch brings big, distorted power chords in the form of a agit-punk, pop slammer. Of course, when Molly Nilsson does punk pop one gets the catchiest chorus this side of The Bangles or The Nerves. However, it's on InchPompeiiInch that Nilsson delivers the album's epic, emotional heartbreaker. Like Inch1995Inch on Nilsson's album Zenith, or InchDays Of DustInch on Twenty Twenty, the lyrics of InchPompeiiInch are heavy with a transcendent sadness, an aching poetry that cuts to the truth of the heart like the best Leonard Cohen lines. It contains the most personal moments of Extreme, a song lit by the dying embers of romance. Yet it's here where the alchemy at the base of all Nilsson's best work is found. Turning small nuggets of personal truth into big, generous universal moments that invite everyone to cry, to love and to fight the power. In an album of jewels, it might be the shining star.This is Molly Nilsson's biggest, boldest and most vital album to date, Extreme is about power. Against the love of power and for the power of love.

2018 . Twenty-Twenty is Molly Nilsson's eigth album; the latest opus of an artist in a constant state of development and strength. Twenty-Twenty is about emerging from the husk of your old self, about binning the chrysalis and daring to stand up both to power, and also to your own limits. In 2018, we see the climate changing, democracy crumbling, inequality and injustice erupting. 2020 examines the near future, seeking out clarity, reflection, renewal and opportunity. It contains anthems so tall as to induce vertigo, leaving the taste of Euro Dance in your mouth, albeit without a four on the floor beat. Here, the pop auteur is haunted by the late Prince, channeling Courtney Love and Lou Reed, anger and love. Recorded as ever in her own Lighthouse Studios and co-released with her imprint Dark Skies Association, the record is consistent in strategy and approach to past releases, yet on 2020 Nilsson pushes the limits of what can be said in the scope of a pop song even further. Despite working with used keyboard sounds that evoke memories of a distorted past, the sound is distinctly contemporary. The record drifts between playful punk methods and hi-fi ideas, strikingly clear through the fuzz of a surrounding world painted with reverb. Rather than gracefully dissecting, 2020 rips apart personal neuroses and insecurities, looking for the roots of issues and the equation that, when solved, will produce the future. 'I don't care if the world is through, every night is new,' 2020 erupts with fist-in-the-air empowerment, a realization that if we're all alone down here, we can still make it.