Instantly familiar but impossibly so, the recorded works of underground synth-pop songwriting darling Molly Nilsson — once described as "the most popular pop star you've never heard of" — are about to be performed live across Australia for the first time.

And despite little-to-no airplay and limited accessibility to Nilsson's work on Australian shores, the gigs are already selling out, with more dates being added.

A contemporary of Aussie underground favourites Ariel Pink and John Maus — who recently performed at Melbourne's SuperSense Maximal festival and covered Nilsson's track Hey Moon — the Swedish-born, Berlin-based home recorder's catalogue is essential listening for obscure record store diggers. But despite a celebrated 10-year, near 10-album career, she's managed to remain largely off the mainstream grid.



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Nilsson's work runs the gamut from home-styled, self-recorded organ-driven music punctuated by her distinct voice, on older classics like Won't Somebody Take Me Out Tonight, through to newer cuts like 2018's electronic Blinded By The Night, with its counterintuitive but alluring broken-beat drum loop.



Underpinning the various musical experiments is an unusual take on popular songwriting that casually melds a wide array of sonic textures, lyrical themes and bygone eras together in a way that sounds obvious and simple, but is cleverly complex and deeply referential at the same time.



"When I first discovered music, it was Elvis, The Beatles, Grease; and from there I got into punk — among everything else, like Berlin techno, for example," Nilsson explains.



"I found that what I enjoyed and became interested in and loved about it all was simply the expression — for me, the emotional expression of ABBA or the Sex Pistols is equal, it's just different emotions and ways of expressing things. But for me it was all just music that gave me kicks, basically."



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An art student-turned self-taught musician, the 30-something-year-old's diverse influences have lent themselves to an instantly familiar sound that sits somewhere in between 60s European pop and modern electronic music, but spiked with the psychological narratives of a casual observer unknowingly trapped inside the mind of armchair intellectual.

'He wants to be the worst because he can't be the best'

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On the track Joyride, Nilsson tells the story of a group of obnoxious men on a train clamouring to impress indifferent passers-by with their bravado while waving their money around. Honing in on one of them, she opines and psychoanalyses:

"His parents never loved him enough as a kid, oh what do I know maybe they really did, but he's got a new daddy now. He wants to be the worst cause he can't be the best, and he's not the first to support all of the rest of us, but even more because: somebody fooled him, and now they rule him, with crumpled paper notes."



This early track — recorded on GarageBand with a drum machine and a keyboard using a built-in MacBook microphone — touches on a Nico-stylised, Francoise Hardy-esque, late-night bar sensibility.



But Nilsson's newer material, like Slice Of Lemon — which laments an inability to identify the hints and signals of casual love and flirtation to the sound of a much bigger, more sophisticated electropop sound — demonstrates an artistic development that is as wide-eyed and big sounding as it is inward looking and introverted.

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She sings:

"The messages were mixed and polarised. I adore everything you do. A slice of lemon. The pride of heaven. So obvious to everyone but me. So ominous to everyone who could see. So why can't you see me?"

Now an established writer of increasingly big-sounding, synth-pop dance tracks, why Nilsson isn't more famous or accessible is a question many fans often wonder about on blogs and internet forums.

Part of it likely comes down to her large yet idiosyncratic, non-commodified body of work — but on the flipside, there's an intentionality in it too.

Nilsson writes, records, produces and releases all of her own work through a self-owned record label — Dark Skies Association — and maintains that she's always been careful to maintain the freedom of being able to develop as an artist, while keeping full control of her accessibility and public persona.

'There's something I'm trying to investigate and figure out'

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Nilsson says of her artistic process: "I'm trying to communicate and investigate. There's always something, some feeling, that I'm trying to figure out."



"Once [I've figured out the feeling], it's important to find a tone that is worth listening to [and that the song is] delivered in a way [that expresses] from the perspective of what you are communicating, not the perspective of the emotion [itself]," she adds.



Having released and now even re-released some nine albums through her Dark Skies Association outlet — before ever setting foot on Australian shores — it's anybody's guess what to expect at her first live shows, or which tracks from her dozens upon dozens of favourites she'll pull out.



But as the shows sell out, the titles of Nilsson's albums seem to track the story of her career almost uncannily, from the aptly titled debut These Things Take Time to her most recent album, titled 2020.

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Nilsson usually performs her music live on her own by singing and playing along to backing tracks, and given that her Australian shows are in high demand, she's expecting to bring along a significantly larger catalogue of music to play to eager fans.

"It's very exciting. I haven't been to Australia before, so I guess I will play shows that try to capture as much of me as I find interesting to show," she says.

"I'm very curious what the shows will be like because it's new territory, and I'm excited to have that feeling. I'm expecting the shows to be very fun."

Nilsson will be playing gigs in Sydney at Freda's on November 28, in Melbourne at the Curtin on November 29, The Golden Wattle in Adelaide on November 30, The Foundry in Brisbane on December 1, and ending back in Melbourne for another gig at the Curtin on December 9.