After more than a decade in the trenches of DIY pop, Molly Nilsson has earned the right to relax. Instead, on her twelfth album Amateur, she does just the opposite… she detonates the idea of legacy itself. Recorded fast, at home, and with the kind of spiritual ferocity that can’t be manufactured, Amateur is Nilsson shaking off the machinery of the music industry and ripping out its heart. And because of that, it might just be her best record yet. Nilsson has always written like someone reaching across the void, armed with sincerity sharp enough to cut through cynicism. And she doubles down here. Amateur is a jubilee for the dreamers and the dropouts, a 13-song manifesto for anyone who’s ever felt swallowed by the rat race and still dared to run it.

The opening track, “Die Cry Lie,” is both a curtain-raiser and a punchline, a satirical diss track skewering the commercialization of emotion, wrapped up in a beat built for chanting back at the world. “How Much Is the World,” the record’s first single, is vintage Nilsson, questioning value in an era where everything seems to have a price tag. Especially our joy. But Amateur’s beating heart sits in the wonderful melancholy of “Valhalla.” With its gorgeous chord changes and crashing drums, it’s a song about growing up while refusing to grow cold. When Nilsson sings, “It’s going to get better now, you’ll see, going to be much better off without me,” the lyric lands like a ceremony of liberation. On the surface it’s like a breakup song, but underneath is the belief that messing up on your own terms is its own form of resistance.

“All The Way” extends that ethos with arms wide open. It’s a hymn to living fully and foolishly, valuing the process over the prize. “Big Life” follows like a sequel, an homage to dreaming, to doing it yourself until your heart beats out of your chest. And by the time “The Bitter End” closes the album, Nilsson has turned friendship itself on its head, another form of love she treats with reverence. Even the hazier corners of Amateur push the listener deeper into the so-called “Mollyverse.” “Get A Life” buries a monster chorus under its snarling bassline. “Swedish Nightmare” toys with self-mythology while wrestling with the thrill and terror of living big. At the center of the album is a question as old as language itself: How did amator (Latin for “lover”) become a slur? Nilsson treats amateurism as an act of rebellion, a defiant refusal to professionalize passion. “I just want to have fun,” she says. “I want to love… all the way.” On Amateur, she does exactly that and implores all of us to do the same.