Robyn has already lived so many lives. The Swedish teen-pop ingenue who blew up worldwide in the 1990s. The rebel dance-floor auteur who went her own way in the 2000s. The mysterious cult hero. The queer icon. The pop queen. The disco poet who did for stilettos and broken bottles what Stevie Nicks did for landslides.
But these days, Robyn’s more excited about the lives she still has in front of her. She’s back with her first album in eight years, Sexistential (out on Friday), and as you can guess from the excellent title, she’s not exactly playing coy. She’s got sex on the brain — the adult kind, with her midlife hormones raging away. As she boasts, “My body’s a spaceship, with the ovaries on hyperdrive.”
Robyn’s got a timeless mystique unlike anyone else in music — always the grown-up in the room, inspiring a rare kind of awe in a genre where novelty usually reigns. Part of her allure is the confident way she bides her time between albums — Sexistential is her first since 2018’s Honey, which was her first since her classic Body Talk trilogy in 2010, the album that gave the world “Dancing on My Own.” She’s willing to wait until she’s got a personal statement to make.
Sexistential is aimed right at the dance floor, in the mode of her fantastic November single “Dopamine.” She’s got a gloriously unapologetic adult perspective — this woman left her GAFs behind in the last century. She’s reporting from life in her forties, with blunt tales of middle-aged lust, single motherhood, and hitting the club as an independent grown-up.
The title banger is quite the manifesto, as Robyn raps about dressing up to go hit the town and hook up with random lovers, while she happens to be pregnant via IVF. When the doctor at the fertility clinic asks about her ideal sperm donor, she admits, “Adam Driver always did kind of give me a boner.” (The doctor gets him mixed up with Adam Sandler.) She wrote the song after André 3000 said he turned to playing the jazz flute because he felt nobody wanted to hear him rap about getting a colonoscopy. But that’s exactly the kind of adult realness she goes for on this album. As she pleads, “Fuck a app, I need me some IRL.”
She co-produced Sexistential with longtime collaborator Klas Åhlund and reteamed with old friend Max Martin — these two basically grew up together, since he produced her 1990s Swedish pop hits. They co-wrote two of the album’s highlights, the phone-sex come-on “Talk to Me” and the sensitive “Into the Sun.”
Honey was her introspective comedown, an album of late-night melancholy where she broods over love pains. This time she’s more playful, after the end of a long-term relationship. Not since Leonard Cohen has anyone made such poetry out of the midlife libido on the prowl, running for the money and the flesh.
Illustration by NICOLE RIFKIN
“Really Real” sets the tone, opening the album with a bittersweet synth-pop picture of two lovers splitting apart. Robyn zeroes in on the precise moment when she falls out of love — in bed, where she’s “tied up under your duvet/You’re midperformance, I’m planning my escape.” It’s a fitting start to the kind of album where sexual fireworks and philosophical crises can erupt side by side.
In one of the most poignant moments, she revisits her 2002 single “Blow My Mind,” revamping it into a vaporwave love song to her son. Back when she first did “Blow My Mind,” it was all electro-clash swagger and loud guitar, as she moves in on her new conquest. But now she’s gushing to her three-year-old, “Just let me crush your scrumptious little face.” She swerves all over emotional extremes in these songs, driven by different kinds of desire.All over Sexistential, she takes stock of the emotional wreckage in her past. But she sounds exhilarated by the hard-won freedom of learning to leave it behind. She’s got so much affection for all of the young Robyns she used to be. But the thrill is her commitment to right now, and the new Robyns she’s got in her future. And on Sexistential, she sounds ready to let them all go hit the dance floor.
