Released: 07/06/2024
In her privileging of instinct and feeling over the pursuance of too-glossy, life-drained perfection, the Swedish-born, Berlin-based Molly Nilsson’s music feels both like an act of resistance (not for nothing is Nilsson’s heroine the revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg), and a vehicle for accessing the noumenal, pure essence of pop – it is the idea of the genre, shorn of all its impedimenta. Think of a smash-hit pop song – let’s say, for argument’s sake, the 1991 track ‘Baby, Baby’ by Amy Grant; now imagine if, instead of her adherence to born-again Christianity, Grant took to reading Marxist philosophy, listened to a strict diet of Arthur Russell and Lizzy Mercier Descloux, and recalibrated her vocal style in the manner of Cosey Fanni Tutti on Chris & Cosey’s seminal 1985 LP Technø Primitiv – that’s what Nilsson’s music sounds like. It’s like those strangely haunting, slightly melancholy europop songs that you'd hear at the disco on the French campsite you stayed at on family holidays in your youth, but could never remember what they were once you got home. It’s wonderful – and Nilsson’s mini-album Solo Paraiso: The Summer Songs, originally released in 2014, and now reissued on vinyl for the first time in 10 years, is full of such beautiful imperfections, from the cracked synths and shimmering piano, to the drum machine which appears to be suffering from heat stroke, and it's one of the very best of her career.