HOW DEAD POLLYS CAME TO BE

Life, the streets, and the incarnation of rage

I love making noise. I love pouring emotions into words, into the shape of goddamn guitars and wild drums.

— Nizze Nilsson

THE COLD KINGDOM

Nizze was born in Norrtälje, a small coastal town north of Stockholm, where the grey Baltic light falls flat and indifferent across the rooftops and the water smells ofrusted iron and forgotten summers. Niclas Nilsson — Nizze, as the street came to call him — grew up in a Sweden that glittered on the surface and bled underneath, a welfare state with cracks wide enough to swallow a man whole.

The love of music was there from the start, like a religious devotion — not one you choose, but one that chooses you. Already at sixteen, seventeen, he was forging words and hammering them into shapes that burned.

But the road from Norrtälje to Stockholm is not measured in kilometres. It's measured in losses. Somewhere along the way — through years of upheaval, through the dissolution of dreams and relationships and the routines that hold a life together — Nizze found himselfwithout a floor beneath his feet. During the 1980s, he was homeless in Stockholm.

The city in winter is no metaphor when you sleep outside in it. It transforms into a white and merciless ice cathedral, where the wind off the water cuts through every layer of clothing and dignity, where the neon signs on the convenience stores glow like mockery against the slick black asphalt, where a human being can become invisible simply by having nowhere to go.

Those nights on the streets of Stockholm were not romantic. They were not a chapter from a rock biography waiting to be aestheticised. They were cold and dark and long, and they could have put an end to everything. Instead, they becamefuel.

He carried punk inside him like a glowing coal in his chest — not warm enough to heat a room, but hot enough to never go completely dark. The Clash. The Ramones. 999. Sex Pistols. Joe Strummer had said that punk rock means exemplary behaviour towards your fellow human beings, and Nizze had taken it more literally than most. He had nothing, and he had the music. In the brutal arithmetic,the music weighed more.

CHEMISTRY OF SURVIVAL

It was during these very years — 1980s Stockholm, where Nizze was fighting for his survival — that he also became part of something real. Sighstens Grannar was a punk band born from the Swedish underground — raw, political and alive in the way that only happens when people have something true to say.

The band counts today among the history of Swedish punk, listed side by side with names like Asta Kask, Ebba Grön and Mob 47. Their song Pig Society was exactly what the title promised: a vivisection of a society feeding on its own citizens, an indictment in distorted guitar chords and screaming vocals. Nizze stood at the microphone and created noise in the way only someone who understands injustice from the inside can.

But bands break up. Splinter. The streets of Stockholm don't care about discographies.

Sighstens Grannar. Photo: Uknown

Nepente. The word comes from ancient Greek — an elixir of forgetting, a drink of fog that Homer writes about in the Odyssey, something given to Helen of Troy to obliterate the sorrow of war. There is a kind of dark poetry in the fact that Nizze named a band after a cure for unbearable pain.

Nepente's music was wrung from the shadows. The songDet Enda Som Är Kvarcarries in its very title the full weight of a person who has stood at the edge and looked down — and chosen to step back. The only thing left. Not safety. Not certainty.Just the music itself, still breathing in the wreckage.

Nizze was never small. He was large in the way that people who have lost everything and still kept their dignity tend to be large — not in volume or boasting, but in his stubborn presence, his refusal to let himself be edited out.

Mansic (later also Hate is Just a Feeling) was the band that carried him out into Europe. With Clabbe — Claes Fredriksson, who would later become a Dead Polly and who would die of a heart attack in September 2023 — Mansic toured the continent in the early 2000s. They played for audiences in countries where Swedish punk was an exotic import, arriving with the scent of pine forests and cold water. Clabbe played guitar the way some people breathe — automatically, necessarily.

Together he and Nizze had a chemistry that is rare and unrepeatable and, as it turned out, finite.

Through all of this, Nizze survived. Rose. Worked. He was a father of four. His youngest son Loke grew up and into the music, as if the notes are genetic, as if punk runs in the blood rather than being taught. He built something from the rubble the streets had left behind. And he kept watch — always watching — for the next band.

Because there is always a next band. The music does not retire from men like Nizze Nilsson. The songs keep forming in the darkness like crystals, like frost on glass — intricate, persistent, impossible to ignore.

Home-delivered punk rock from Dead Pollys on Bullet For The Wicked, a record intended as a slap in the face for all those who like to push others down for their own gain — bullies, leaders without empathy, and religious fanatics who destroy reality for innocent people.

— Zero Music Magazine, 2015

THE RESURRECTION IN THREE CHORDS

In 2011, in Stockholm, Nizze founded Dead Pollys. He found a drummer named Ola Höök at a small summer party and asked him on the spot — as you do when you recognise something necessary in a stranger. Hans Müller joined on guitar, and Stene on bass.

The first EP, Waiting For Tomorrow, was released in 2013 — softer than what was to come, the edges not yet fully hardened. But it carried the seed. It carried the voice: the low, irreplaceable baritone that an Italian reviewer would later compare to a crossing between Nick Cave and Till Lindemann of Rammstein — a voice that does not ask for your attention but commands it.

Juba Nurmenniemi came in on bass, carrying decades of musical experience from the hard rock scene in Kolsva with Achilleus Vrede, through psychedelic rock, metal, all the way to Celtic punk with Sir Reg — a band that won awards as the best Celtic punk band in the world and toured alongside The Mahones, The Misfits and Thin Lizzy. When Juba's bass locked in with Nizze's raging need to say something true, Dead Pollys ceased to be a project and became a force.

RICCARDO DAGA AND STRUMMERLAND

Ola Höök at Hijazz, Uppsala. Photo: Pernilla Larding

Juba. Photo: Pernilla Larding

He carried punk inside him like a glowing coal in his chest — not warm enough to heat a room, but hot enough to never go completely dark. The Clash. The Ramones. Sex Pistols. Joe Strummer had said that punk rock means exemplary behaviour towards your fellow human beings, and Nizze had taken it more literally than most. He had nothing, and he had the music. In the brutal arithmetic, the music weighed more.

The album Strummerland arrived in 2019, its title a love letter to Joe Strummer and the neighbourhood where punk first showed Nizze what was possible. That same year Dead Pollys took The Vibrators — genuine first generation punk veterans from 1977 — on a Swedish tour.

Daga became more than a technician. He became a creative partner, a bridge between the band's Swedish rawness and a European production standard that got the music to ears it would otherwise never have reached.

When Dead Pollys came with debut album Bullet For The Wicked four years ago it was a record with good songs but a thin sound. On Strummerland, Dead Pollys have achieved a fatter production that does full justice to the new songs, and melodically they have once again created some real punk pearls.

— Zero Music Magazine, 2019

THE TRUTH OF TOMORROW

In 2022, Dead Pollys opened for 999 at the Dublin Castle in London— the famous Camden venue where countless punk legends had stood before them. The circle closed when Clabbe Fredriksson — Nizze's old brother-in-arms from Mansic — stepped in on lead guitar.

In spring 2023, Dead Pollys toured Sweden with 999. That is not a small sentence. 999 started in London in 1976 and have been playing punk for almost half a century. They have survived every wave of indifference and every decade of critics declaring punk dead — and they were still marching. And they chose to march through Swedish cities with Dead Pollys by their side.

Truth of Tomorrow was released in June 2023 via Too Loud Records — twelve fast, straight-ahead songs. The Italian reviewers noted the relentless assault. The German reviewers called it classic punk, 77-style. The Brazilian reviewers called the album one of the best records of the year.

Because that was what he had always been — not above the audience, not performing at a distance, but in it, of it, one among those who needed the noise just as desperately as he needed to create it.

THE LOSS, LOKE AND THE SONG THAT CARRIED THEM FORWARD

In September 2023, Clabbe Fredriksson died of a heart attack. Sudden and final. With him went the Mansic years and the European tours and decades of guitar strings pressed against leather-hard fingers. It was a loss that made the whole band stagger, two days after the release party for Truth of Tomorrow.

But they found comfort and strength in the music. The only thing they could do to keep going was to write. Nizze wrote the lyrics toMe and Claes — a tribute to his fallen brother-in-arms, a song carrying the full weight of the brotherhood between two men who had shared stages and tour buses and decades of shared noise. Juba wrote the music with a nod to both The Clash and Rancid.

Loke and Juba as Dead Pollys is playing at Clabbes funeral. Photo: Pernilla Larding

And on guitar on the recording played Loke Nilsson (formerly Richardsson) — Nizze's son — who took the place where Clabbe had stood and carried the music forward with young hands on old strings.

The single Me and Claes (feat. Loke Richardsson) was released on 26 April 2024 via Too Loud Records. Lelle had just started in the band and got the chance to put his flavour on a second guitar. It is a song that blends rock, Clash-reggae and punk — mournful and warm at the same time, like sunlight breaking through the rain.

Loke Nilsson is more than a guest musician. He is the music being passed on. He is currently in his final year at Rytmus, one of Sweden's most respected music schools. There is something that cannot be taught — that thing which makes a person choose the music, again and again, regardless of the cost. Nizze has it. Loke has it. It was passed on not through instruction but through something deeper — through growing up in a house wheremusic was never background but always the main event.

Nizze was all over the place, and sometimes right in the face of someone in the audience. It doesn't take many seconds before Nizze leaves the stage and for the rest of the show he's in the middle of the crowd's heart.

— Swedish reviewer

Nizze is an elemental force without equal. People sing along, give the band the finger because they ask for it, and cause chaos and destruction — but always with a glint in the eye.

— Zero Music Magazine, on Better Off Alive

A BAND ON THE MOVE

In December 2023, Dead Pollys headed to the United Kingdom. Newcastle. Preston. Darlington. It was 999 themselves who had invited them — a recognition, an invitation, a passing of the torch between generations. On the British stages, Clabbe's guitar remained on stage during the shows — not merely a memorial but an actual presence.

During 2024, the band continued to grow. They toured with Snide Remarks and Floral Detectives from the UK, opened for TV Smith — and recorded the live albumB etter Off Alive at Gamla Enskede Bryggeri in Stockholm. Raw, unfiltered, alive in the way that only things recorded in real rooms with real people in front of you can be.

Clabbes guitar on stage at Trillians, Newcastle. Photo: Will Binks.

Better Off Alivewas released in 2025 via Too Loud Records. That same year Dead Pollys booked shows with Conflict — the British anarcho-punk band formed in 1981, violently political, anti-war, unwilling to compromise. If 999 represents the melodic wing of original punk, Conflict represents its anarchist cathedral.

Dead Pollys call themselves' vintage punk by vintage punks'and there is a humility in that. They make no claim to having invented anything new. They claim to have felt something real — and that that feeling deserves to be heard.

REBELLION FESTIVAL, COVERS AND, WHY NOT, HAWAIIAN PUNK

In May 2026, a tour is planned with Kauz of Affliction from Hawaii. Shows already booked in Sweden, Germany, Czech Republic, England and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Too Loud Records is working on an upcoming album —Pollymimic— where Dead Pollys don't play a single song. Instead, it's their songs covered by bands with roots in Sweden, Italy, Ireland, England and the USA. From fragile versions to stone-hard ones.

In August, Dead Pollys play at Rebellion Punk Festival in Blackpool, the most coveted festival in the genre. They had received no response to their attempts to get in touch — but one of the co-organisers saw and heard them live in Reading at the Purple Turtle. And just like that, the matter was settled.

Dead Pollys are a hard-working band and more shows are being negotiated as we speak. The story is not over. It never is.