The self-proclaimed Fembot has always pushed people’s buttons. Robyn might be best known for bringing raw emotion to the dancefloor, but her pop bangers about desire and despair are often spiked with commentary on social programming: “Plug me in and flip some switches,” she once quipped, posing as a sexed-up cyborg with a bloody, beating heart. So it’s not a shock to find the Swedish star in a lab coat on Dopamine, her first single in seven years. The song rushes with glittering, arpeggiated synths, but Robyn, now 46, holds it at arm’s length. “I know it’s just dopamine, but it feels so real to me / I’m tripping on our chemistry,” she muses, taking notes as her synapses tingle. “Is love more than chemicals?” she seems to be asking. Does it matter if it’s not? But this time the song is no social critique – it’s a whole new philosophy.
Sexistential, Robyn’s ninth album, unravels the fixation on romantic love that fuelled her biggest songs. Gone are the soft edges and pulsing, sensual house of her previous album Honey, and back are the sharp electronic sounds of 2010’s Body Talk through a new lens. With long-term collaborator Klas Åhlund and a few familiar faces (including Metronomy’s Joe Mount and Swedish pop royalty Max Martin), Sexistential reimagines Robyn’s discography without romance as a vehicle. The title track is a sub-three-minute case study in her new mentality. Over minimal, jerking 80s house Robyn raps about hooking up while undergoing IVF as a solo parent: “Fuck a single mom, I’m not judgmental,” she winks, cleaving sex from reproduction and nuclear family. Its counterpart is Blow My Mind, a revamp of her billowy 2002 single made psychedelic, faster, sharper – no longer a textbook love song, but a song about loving her young son.
Twisting a classic Robyn trope, opener Really Real gives us the gory details of a break-up. Under the covers, the singer realises “mid-performance” that a relationship is over, and a thumping, claustrophobic drum machine drives the song towards inevitable emotional collapse. But instead of wrenching catharsis, it’s interrupted by a tender phone call from her mother: glass shatters, electric guitar roars, the world doesn’t end. Straight out of 2010 (which, in Robyn terms, is no bad thing), Sucker for Love races over revved-up video-game synths and lobs an emotional grenade at that ex: “If you’re scared, say you’re scared,” she dares. Even with its retro vocoder and Ministry of Sound piano, Talk to Me feels like fresher ground: part therapy, part phone sex, it takes a scalpel to a truly scary need for validation.
As with all great philosophers, occasionally it’s hard to follow Robyn’s argument. The album’s finale, Into the Sun, is a surging electro-ballad with the sonic trappings of victory, but tangled religious imagery makes it tricky to parse – the rare Robyn song that leaves you uncertain where she stands. Instead, Sexistential’s defining moment falls on Dopamine. Throwing off that lab coat, Robyn doesn’t just surrender to emotion, as on past bangers, but finds a way to hold two truths at the same time: feelings are chemical, and some feelings feel amazing. “When I let go, it’s so easy,” she spins, giddy, before hitting a high note that comes straight from the gut. Sometimes, joy is as simple as cold water on a hot day: clarifying, skin-tingling, essential.
