Sixteen years since Body Talk? Eight since Honey? Robyn’s best albums feel closer and further away than that. The Swedish indie popstar’s best music is timeless in that surreal way; untouched by trends come and gone, and so ubiquitous as to have existed with us forever. Both minimal and maximal, her songs have a purity. Beats and melody are cut down until the nerves are exposed.
That’s still true on her new album, Sexistential, a refined, immaculate set of pop songs which still burst with weirdness and impulse. She flirts with solipsism, references ‘juicy hentai’ and, inexplicably, Don’t Mess with the Zohan. And in its big swings, the album moves with a sense of instinct and poise only gained from a lifetime of living as Robyn.
And Robyn has lived a lot of life since her last record. Most notably, she has had a child as a single parent through IVF, and now writes from a new perspective on motherhood, sex, love and all the ways those concepts can become tangled up.
Lead single ‘Dopamine’ is similar to a song like ‘Honey’ on the surface. They’re both dance songs about pleasure, which mirror the ecstatic rush of touch and connection through the magic of a good hook. But there’s subtlety and specificity to her writing which separates the tracks emotionally. While ‘Honey’ is lovestruck, ‘Dopamine’ questions the nature of pleasure itself. It views love as an act of belief, in a way that’s borderline spiritual. Our experiences are chemical misfires, unless we tell ourselves a story that says otherwise.
Opener ‘Really Real’ subverts the classic breakup song by also leaning into a reality-bending questioning of events. Now that she doesn’t feel a tangible closeness with her partner, how can she be sure any sexual encounter with them isn’t just play acting? The beginning of the end. Sexistential indeed.
And then there’s all the welcome oddness giving the record colour and staying power. Take ‘Blow My Mind’, a cute and clever rework of her 2002 song co-produced with Max Martin. Now made for her three-year-old, she inverts the pop-song language of infatuation to explore the surprise and discovery of motherhood, without having to alter any lyrics. On the title-track, she raps about looking for sex while pregnant, and it somehow works (“Fuck a Plan B, baby, it’s no big deal / I’m already ten weeks in maternity”).
That eccentric strain lives on through the production, where she deepens her long partnership with Klas Åhlund. On ‘Blow My Mind’, a rubbery bassline, Laurie Anderson vocoders and jazzy interludes mirror all the playfulness she’s experiencing. Even ‘Light Up’ the most typically old-school Robyn ballad, is backed by chirpy spoken word about death drops to undercut the seriousness.
With just nine tightly constructed and sonically consistent songs, the record is a fleeting rush, but what keeps it from being slight is all the rich perspective and detail. Our era of autobiographical pop, where records are laced with patronising easter eggs about its stars’ messy private lives, often rests on the same dopamine-spiking that has us refreshing social feeds for a morsel of news. Robyn understands the thrill of pop which hacks your body chemistry, but her approach to pleasure is more nourishing. Even when laying her private thoughts bare, the emphasis is on finding the universal lurking within. Sexistential is about dumb pleasure made complex by looking closer. It sounds timeless, too.
