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 “Kids Today,” where Nilsson is the voice of wisdom, archly commenting on the eternal struggle between youth and authority. “They Will Pay” 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 “Pompeii” that Nilsson delivers the album’s epic, emotional heartbreaker. Like “1995” on Nilsson’s album Zenith, or “Days Of Dust” on Twenty Twenty, the lyrics of “Pompeii” 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....
LP $24.00
06/17/2022
CD $17.50
05/20/2022
Night School announces a new pressing of the long sold-out debut album by Molly Nilsson, These Things Take Time, on galaxy vinyl, and for the first time on CD. As a significant cultural artifact of the underground pop movement that bubbled up in the early 21st century, it’s an important landmark. In Molly Nilsson’s herstory it remains one of her most adored works. It would be easy to say that Molly Nilsson needs no introduction, but These Things Take Time is an introduction. Originally self-released in 2008 on a limited CDR run with handfolded sleeve, Nilsson’s debut album has slowly taken over the hearts of many. In 2014 this modern classic of autonomous, DIY pop and punk-as-you-like attitude was released as a beautiful edition of double vinyl, featuring unreleased bonus tracks across two discs—it sold out within a month of release!
CD $17.50
01/21/2022
2XLP $35.75
01/21/2022
“Hey Moon” remains one of Swedish singer Molly Nilsson’s most popular songs. Originally released on her debut album These Things Take Time, the song since took on new life being covered by other artists and Molly famously never plays it live. In act of reclamation, Molly Nilsson is releasing "Hey Moon" as a 7” single with all profits donated to Black Lives Matter worldwide. It comes backed with a rare early song, "Silver."
7" $12.00
12/17/2021
When Molly Nilsson began recording her second album Europa in 2009, the world seemed to be at a turning point and she along with it. In the aftermath of a global financial crash, at the dawn of a new decade, the Stockholm-born, Berlin-based singer was busy molding her songwriting into an idiosyncratic, personal mythology that would take her to every continent, speaking directly to hearts in every corner of the globe. The first album on her own Dark Skies Association imprint, the first recorded in her home studio The Lighthouse, Europa broke new ground for Nilsson at the time. But also it spoke earnestly to the world about an idealism, an openness and hope that has not dimmed in the eleven years since its release. Europa contains the songs of a young, idealistic songwriter coming to terms with her genius for cutting to the chase, saying it as it is and, most importantly, as it should be. Over ten years on the artist’s vim and urge for...more.
LP $20.25
05/28/2021
CD $16.00
05/28/2021
Long overdue reissue of this Molly Nilsson early release (her fourth), now repackaged and reissued via Night School / DSA. By the time Molly Nilsson released History, she had already established a fledgling cult status built on homemade YouTube videos and home-burnt CDRs. Writing from a distance, it’s clear that this is the first classic album in her canon and arguably a classic of the 21st Century underground music panorama. While the methodology onit hadn’t changed from Nilsson’s previous 3 albums—it was recorded solo at The Lighthouse, Nilsson’s home studio based on a Berlin crossroads—on this record the songwriting reached a new peak and the emotional scythe cut deeper. Here, Nilsson managed to combine a cosmic, outward looking perspective with an intimate knowledge of the human condition and its place in these turbulent times. In truth, no other songwriter has excavated the modern psyche so clearly and perfectly.
LP $27.00
04/12/2019
CD $16.00
04/12/2019
Twenty Twenty is Molly Nilsson’s eighth album: the latest opus of an artist in a constant state of development and strength. In 2018, with the climate changing, democracy crumbling, inequality and injustice erupting, this album examines the near future, seeking clarity, reflection, renewal and opportunity. It contains anthems so tall as to induce vertigo, leaving the taste of Euro-dance in the mouth, albeit without a four on the floor beat. Here, the pop auteur is haunted by the late Prince, channelling 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 this one Nilsson pushes the limits of 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.
LP $20.25
11/23/2018
CD $16.00
11/23/2018
***NEW YELLOW VINYL PRESSING!!! The Travels represents a signpost in the continuing journey that is the songs of Berlin-based artist Molly Nilsson. Starting out by hand-dubbing CDRs and forging a singular path in the global pop underground, Nilsson’s art has grown to the extent where hers is a precise songwriting devoid of unnecessary flourish. Her songs are perfect silhouettes of feelings everyone shares but that few can articulate with such heart-rending, icy pathos. Journeys offer change—the possibility of renewal—and on Tthis album, Nilsson’s resonant voice is found curling around a new sense of optimism and wide-eyed discovery that was only alluded to in her previous work. Songs like “Dear Life” might be spiked with a barbed sense of the dejected, but the presiding feeling is one of optimism, of being in love with life despite a shield of cynicism. “Dirty Fingers” brings a melancholy recognizable from previous work but with an incessant beat and ecstatic underpinning. In case the listener missed it, “The Power Ballad” brings an endearing sincerity to proceedings that also offers a tantalizing question: can you be skeptical about love but still be bewitched? On this fifth long-player, Nilsson’s perspective is challenged and manipulated by changes in environment and psychological space: like any other traveller the protagonist brings their own set of values and emotional states to new places, coloring them with a wash of subjectivity. Based loosely on Marco Polo’s “Travels” and reading like a map of the protagonist’s geographical and inner journey, this album reveals new places...
LP $24.00
02/23/2018
CD $16.00
02/23/2018
***BACK IN STOCK!!! That we live in a world changed is beyond question. 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 something better. For an artist who has so successfully created her own environment and gradually let in others, her eighth studio album Imaginations directly engages with her surroundings, engendering change and allowing love in. This album dreams big, recasting storming, stadium-sized pop into the internal language of the solo auteur. It’s not escapism, it’s a kaleidoscope and an alternative view, an agent of change. Nilsson’s vision is perhaps more forceful than the emotionally fragile moments of her previous album, exemplified on “Memory Foam,” a bright, driving pop song that belies themes of nostalgia and the past, reminding us that Nilsson alone can make one feel so welcome in loneliness. If there’s overt anger in songs like “Money Never Sleeps,” an anthem for a post-capitalist utopia, seams of optimism are also sewn into the album’s genetic code. Any revolutionary will tell you that anger alone achieves nothing— Nilsson’s mission is to offer some alternatives we can hold close. For example, “Not Today Satan” is a song about accepting love as the agent of change: “Don’t be sad, but do get mad at all the small men who act so tall, in the end they always fall; there ain’t no sin in giving into love, that’s just how we’re winning the fight.”...
LP $20.25
06/16/2017
CD $16.00
06/16/2017
***BACK IN STOCK!!! The beginning moments of Molly Nilsson’s second album Follow The Light now seem like the start of a personal mythology that was to reach further than she could have imagined. Few contemporary artists have seeped into the underground pop psyche more thoroughly than the Stockholm-born songwriter. After releasing her debut These Things Take Time on hand-made CDrs, Nilsson’s follow up was a leap in scope and ambition. Of course, the personal takes on a tumultuous life in Berlin and the journeys to and from it inform the songs, as before, but a growing maturity in the songwriting is in evidence. From the diary pages of her first album to a growing stature as a songwriter in touch with the universal, this album contains many of Nilsson’s now firm fan-favourites. Follow The Light is the second installment of an ongoing Molly Nilsson reissue campaign and the first time the album has been available on vinyl.
LP $20.25
02/10/2017
CD $16.00
02/10/2017
***A sweeping, cinematic, emotional change is in the air. Molly Nilsson’s sixth studio album Zenith begins with clear, wide eyes open to Earth as we would love it to be but seldom is. Recorded in her home of Berlin and whilst touring and, as ever, conceived, produced, written and recorded in solitude, Zenith is Nilsson’s big statement and consequently her most affecting work to date. It sees her reveling in big arrangements, sweeping synth strings, bigger choruses and emotions. Like the rest of us she looks within and to endless sunsets in wonder and puzzlement. That Molly Nilsson is a DIY cult figure is beyond question; she has always written directly and with wit straight down the line between the universal and the personal. The difference with Zenith, and you can hear it in the opening chords of opener The Only Planet, is that her scope is now much wider and her heart heavier than ever before: over a post-ecstatic dusk, Nilsson serenades the globe in a loving embrace. Following on, 1995 is, arguably, one of Nilsson’s finest songs to date. It’s one of those songs to learn the lyrics to, to listen to on repeat, a reason to wear the grooves down to the bone, it’s why pop music can be one of the greatest art forms we have. It’s an example of how, on this album, Molly draws the listener closer to her heart than ever before. Over the 13 tracks here we get the impression...
LP $27.00
11/27/2015
CD $16.00
11/27/2015