Critic-at-Large

But It Feels So Real to Me 

Robyn’s Sexistential

Often these days I find myself evangelising to my peers about the left-of-field Swedish pop rebel Robyn. If the name doesn’t ring a bell—which, despite her well-documented and wide-ranging influence (Britany Spears, Lorde, Charli xcx, Taylor Swift), is surprisingly often the case—all I have to do is sing a few lines from her 2010 sleeper hit, “Dancing on My Own”: “I’m in the corner / Watching you kiss her / Oh-oh-oh”. Everybody knows it. I mean, I started two different dancefloors at two different house parties with that song on Easter weekend alone. (Yes, they were both with largely the same social circle. No, I’m not embarrassed. Yes, the trick works every time.) Those three famous lines—that’s Robyn’s entire aesthetic in a nutshell: alone, cornered, dumped; weirdly spying on her ex; and then releasing it all in wordless exclamation. Add to the sharp simplicity of her lyrics her oddball musical stylings—electro-pop melded with 90s eclecticism, a pinch of original 80s synthpop, and a fistful of hand-over-heart, pen-to-paper, honest-to-God balladeering—and the song is undeniable, uniquely Robyn’s. As Jia Tolentino summarises in her new, authoritative profile of the singer in the New Yorker, Robyn’s music often has “sorrow as the content, ecstasy as the form.” 

Sexistenial is her ninth album, her first in eight years, and in some sense it’s a return to the electropop sound of that 2010 work on Body Talk, the album from which “Dancing on My Own” is drawn. But where Body Talk was something of a sprawl, encyclopaedic and nonlinear, both in its textual history—it was first released in three smaller EPs from which selections were made to form an album—and in its narrative form—its songs are sung by a number of ostensibly fictional narrators—Sexistential clocks in at a tight twenty-nine minutes. It also feels more strongly placed on its author’s voice, as the now forty-six-year-old Robyn, split for good from her long-term on-again-off-again partner, considers her singleness anew and decides to have a baby on her own, both IRL and on the album. In those senses, Sexistential follows her previous record, 2018’s Honey, quite fluently: another short, chronologically formed, semiautobiographical album. But where 2018’s Honey showed the singer’s new interest in the loops and hypnotics of club music, Robyn’s emphasis on Sexistential is on songs once again, plain and simple. 

Well, there’s a bit of music history for you, kids—and that’s only considering her latest three projects, not mentioning the early period!—but what about the songs? I just adore the way they’re working here. “Sucker for Love” is an early favourite in the tracklist: replete with a moan in the chorus, I love its serious posturing, its insistence on not being misunderstood or deemed a sentimental loser. “I used to have thicker skin / But I chose to let you in,” she sings on the bridge. And I love that she chose, willingly risking destruction—“Not a sucker / I’m a sucker for love.” Before that gets to be too much, the tracklist turns over to “It Don’t Mean a Thing”, and she declares something quite different—melancholic, even—as across its amazing, recitative-style verse melodies she discovers how much memory fails to capture of the past, how letting go is as much a choice as it is the only choice. 

There’s another very great streak in the phone-sex dancefloor romp of “Talk to Me”, the record’s second single, as it collides with the title track and is thrown into relief: “Fuck a app, I need me some IRL” is the killer opening bar of “Sexistential”. Robyn gets raunchy and funny here, horny on IVF, scrolling on dating apps, going out and feeling herself. But before you don your fascinator and clutch your pearls, let Robyn sing you back home on the next track, “Light Up”, with its stunning metaphors (“I was looking at you like a mirror / All I could make of the glitter / Was my mistakes” !!!) and the anthemic, stadium-ready longing of its chorus, “Baby light up / Light up the way to your heart.” Now that’s sexistential: that need for human connection through it all. 

If anything’s missing on Sexistenial, it’s that 90s eclecticism I previously identified as a key aspect of Robyn’s style. The most eclectic thing here is the title track’s mom-rap— provocative enough, definitely (please see the alternately confused and awestruck YouTube comments under her recent SNL performance of the song). I guess there’s also some random Japanese vocal sample on “Blow My Mind”, but nothing quite as wacky as, for example, one of the Body Talk deep cuts, “Dancehall Queen”, in which Robyn and her producers lovingly appropriate Jamaican music for three minutes straight. That’s an aspect of the Robyn I love: an artist so sincere and straight-up—gifted, too—that she’s able to flaunt her “bad” taste in a lowkey insane you-can’t-cancel-me tease. 

But why rag on an album as front-to-back brilliant as Sexistential, Jackson, for what it’s not, when what it is is so good? Maybe there’s a nuttiness missing here, but when Robyn talks, you shut up and listen. Earlier I mentioned the “sharp simplicity” of her lyrics, and, for me, this often manifests in a kind of sage-like quality, a quality that persists even over some of those earlier 2010 tracks in which she didn’t have a hand in writing the lyrics directly. Sexistential’s lead single, “Dopamine”, runs on this high, sage, gnomic articulacy. Spread over a massive synth pad, a bassy vocal sample, and saw-tooth synths and arpeggiators passing up and down pass filters, Robyn’s melody rides in on a clear stream, speech-like and deceptively simple: “I know it’s just dopamine / But it feels so real to me / I’m tripping on our chemistry / It’s firing up inside of me / I just need to know / That I’m not alone.” There’s a constant turning over of the line, of meaning, in a search not for resolution but for complexity. Robyn has never made anyone feel less heartbroken, just better about being heartbroken—we’re not dead yet. 

Not to get too sexistential or anything, but for just about my entire life, I’ve been told to stop overthinking, to stop overanalysing, to just get over it. As it happens, me and my friend, the one who really switched me on to Robyn, dated for three-and-a-half months last year. Just three-and-a-half months! But the truth is that there are still days from September, October, November—days in which I must have done plenty of things, seen plenty of friends, gone to classes, and cooked meals—when most of what I remember is his face. Robyn is the pop star who never gets over anything, who hurtles toward conclusions only to loop around and give things another go, who sighs, cries, then white-girl raps her way back to strength, who lets it all hang out, because she knows deep down that sorrow shared is sorrow halved. So of course she’s a sucker for love, not because she’s a fool, but because there are too many things in this world that can’t be so easily gotten over, not least the world itself; too many feelings that can’t be helped or neatly resolved, only released.