Molly Nilsson’s Synth-Pop Puts Politics Front and Center

Nothing in this world is certain except death and taxes, and Molly Nilsson writes songs about both.

The Swedish-born singer began her career making hazy synth-pop tracks, with titles like “More Certain Than Death” and “I Hope You Die,” that suggested love and mortality were always intertwined. But, over the past decade, politics has increasingly shaded her work: A Nilsson record might be the only place where references to late capitalism and the trickle-down economy feel perfectly at home in a pop song. Her latest album “Un-American Activities” features a song about communism that’s also a hommage to Madonna’s “Vogue.”

“I’m writing the kind of music that I want to listen to myself,” Nilsson said recently in a video interview from Berlin, where she lives.

Over her 16-year career, Nilsson, 39, has established a cult following while working outside the music industry’s norms. She is her own manager, books her own tours and has never hired a publicist. For years, she pressed her own records and hawked them around record stores herself.

“The industry needs you a lot more than you need it,” she said. “I’m kind of bulletproof,” she added, “because even if I fail at what I’m doing, at least I did it.”

“Un-American Activities,” released this month, is Nilsson’s most nakedly political record yet: an album-length exploration of McCarthyist blacklisting that draws lines between what Nilsson called “the persecution of leftists and socialists” in the ’40s and ’50s and the rise of the far-right today.