On her days off from working at the cloakroom at Berlin’s Berghain nightclub, Molly Nilsson began recording lo-fi pop gems. Armed with a knack for creating gloomy ballads that sparkle with mordant observations on life, loneliness, and the city, it didn’t take long for the Stockholm-born, Berlin-based artist to etch her name in the hearts of audiences from Manchester to Tokyo, now enjoying significant cult status across the world.

Together with her Spartan stage setup, her first songs captured her essence in the eyes of thousands: miniature, realist, personally driven odes to a certain type of young life, revolving around late night bars, the feeling of loneliness in crowded places, and nagging reminders that not even the tiniest moments of beauty afforded to people by a city can ever last.

However, while her more recent records are brighter, so too are they more political. More often than not, Nilsson uses her platform as a way to address social issues, including gun violence, the male gaze, late capitalism, and “neoliberal bullshit,” as she neatly put it in the 2015 anthem “Lovers are Losers.”