- Konichiwa/Young
- 2026
Imagine if Kate Bush came back with an electroclash record, or if Björk's first album in years was a straight-up pop concept LP about life as a fun, horny middle-aged single mom. That would be weird, right? It would warrant comment. In terms of both mystique and influence, Robyn is right up there with the two of them, along with any other veteran art-pop boundary-pusher you might care to name. But Robyn came up in the world of pre-TRL global mega-pop. Even at her most auteurist, she's kept the pleasure principal right at the center of her music. So now, after years of silence and the saddest, most mature album of her career, she can still return with a short and joyous burst of all-out physicality and it doesn't even seem remotely out of character.
This is what Robyn does. She disappears for eons at a time, but it never feels like she's gone away because her influence continues to reverberate among newer artists who correctly see her as the blueprint for how to balance mass appeal with idiosyncratic cult-of-personality digression. Meanwhile, she stays off on her own personal journey, experiencing new milestones in life and using those experiences to fuel her next transformation. When she emerges again, it's because she's got some new feeling that she wants to explore, not because it seems like the right time for a new Robyn record. That said, it really seems like the right time for a new Robyn record this minute, so it's a happy coincidence that this is the moment she's coming back with a dizzy, euphoric new album.
Maybe every time feels like the right time for a new Robyn record. Maybe that's the secret. It's been 30 years since the Swedish teenager Robin Carlsson burst onto the global consciousness with a couple of straight-up chart hits that she recorded with Max Martin back when the only people who knew the name "Max Martin" were the types to scrutinize Ace Of Base liner notes. It's been 20 years since Robyn reintroduced herself as a DIY critical favorite, a figure who broke out of the major-label system where she'd become an afterthought and released her own cleverly sentimental mega-pop anthems on her own label. Those cleverly sentimental mega-pop anthems might not have been proper hits, at least in the US, but they proved that a great pop artist could find a hungry audience even outside the pop system. Over the years, her songs have quietly pushed their way to normie saturation, and now they feel like the mainstream smashes that they always should've been.
Robyn's last album was a left turn of sorts. Almost eight years ago, Robyn released Honey, an emotional club odyssey about loss and longing. Robyn used that album, which itself was her first in eight years, to process the death of her early collaborator Christian Falk and the end of a long-term relationship. Along the way, she largely left pop structure behind and lost herself in the therapeutic repetition of club music. The songs on Honey weren't all that long, but they felt long. She moved into more esoteric realms, finding solace in the pleasure of endless thump. On Sexistential, Robyn takes a hard pivot back into the giddy joy of straight-up pop music, made with precision and ear-tickling melodic grace that she and her fellow Swedes established as the sound of the global charts a few generations ago. For the first time in many years, she even brought in Max Martin as a collaborator.
The Max Martin break-glass-in-case-of-emergency move might seem faintly desperate if any other pop star did it. In fact, it did seem faintly desperate when Taylor Swift adapted that strategy last year. I continue to hold The Life Of A Showgirl in more esteem than most of my peers (or this website's commenters), but it was pretty clear that the decision to make an entire Max Martin/Shellback album was an attempt to recapture some mysterious juice that Swift was worried about losing. Robyn works on a very different level. Like Honey (or The Life Of A Showgirl), Sexistential is a response to a very specific moment in the artist's life.
Robyn's life circumstance is this: Three years ago, she went through IVF and became a mother. In interviews, she talks about the anxiety that she had about her romantic status and her ticking biological clock. Now, she's raising her son by herself (with family support), and she feels free to mentally decouple her love life from where she's at with her family. The experience of parenthood is a gigantic change, the kind of things that will rearrange your entire soul. But it doesn't erase whatever other needs you might have, and that's how we wind up with the song "Sexistential," in which Robyn quasi-raps about flicking through dating apps while breastfeeding.
Max Martin is not Robyn's main collaborator on Sexistential. His name only appears in the credits of two songs, the delirious phone-sex request "Talk To Me" and "Into The Sun," a gloriously percolating album closer about launching yourself heedlessly into whatever the future has in store. Instead, Robyn's main Sexistential collaborator is Teddybears member Klas Åhlund, a guy who's been working on Robyn records since 2005. Åhlund produced every track on Sexistential, usually in collaboration with Robyn but sometimes by himself. A few other familiar names appear in the credits, too: Metronomy's Joseph Mount, both members of Röyksopp, Addison Rae collaborator Elvira Anderfjärd. Delightfully, Taio Cruz, the "light it up like it's dy-no-mite" guy, co-wrote the single "Dopamine." Sweden really went to work on this album.
If you've been paying attention to its rollout, Sexistential might seem a little slight. It's a short record, nine songs in just over half an hour, and four of those songs have come out as pre-release singles. One of those pre-release singles isn't even a properly new song. It's "Blow My Mind," a rewritten and re-recorded version of a song that Robyn first released more than 24 years ago. The original version of "Blow My Mind" was a love song that she co-wrote with its producer, Frou Frou member and Seal/Madonna collaborator Guy Sigsworth. It was on Don't Stop The Music, one of the albums that really only came out in Sweden before Robyn reemerged as a critical cause celebre. Here, Robyn, Åhlund, and fellow Swedish pop professional Alexander Kronlund have reimagined that song, transforming it into dizzy, arpeggio-drunk synthpop and tweaking the lyrics to refashion the track into an ode to Robyn's baby son: "Your unbearably cute scrumptious little face/ Crushing me every single day."
That's a crazy thing to do! In a way, "Blow My Mind" conflates longing for different kinds of physical affection, maybe even slyly suggesting that they're not as different as they seem. So even if these songs might seem familiar, they still take us to strange, undiscovered places. For lots of pop stars, the album about parenthood is the moment of deep maturity, the record where they put childish things away. But Robyn's last record was her mature one, and she clearly doesn't want to go in that direction again. Instead, she indulges all sorts of freaky urges on Sexistential. That's how she can get away with something as purely goofy and arguably cringe as the title track. Even at her most ridiculous, Robyn continues to look for ways to use recognizable pop-music forms to explore feelings that recognizable pop-music forms haven't yet touched. It's one thing that keeps Sexistential from sounding like a regular dance-pop album.
Another thing that stops Sexistential from sounding like a regular dance-pop album is Robyn's voice, one of the most expressive instruments that we know. Since she was a kid, Robyn has been able to convey oceans of emotion over the some of the glossiest music you ever heard. Opening track "Really Real" is full of head-warping synth-hiccups, with squealing distorto-guitar solo that's been chopped up into digital shards. But Robyn brings the song down to earth, using all that glitch-splatter to sing about the terrifying and self-doubting vulnerability of a newly discovered mutual crush. The drum machines of "Sucker For Love" bubble as insistently as Robyn's need to break free from isolation: "No love is no joke." On "It Don't Mean A Thing," she sings about the lingering intimacy that she shares with an ex, and her duet partner is her own multi-tracked voice, transformed into a merciless robotic blare.
These days, the announcement of a new Robyn album comes with an implicit level of pressure. Robyn releases new music so infrequently that every new record seems destined to disappoint. When you've made a whole lot of glorious music, expectations simply stop being reasonable. Sexistential doesn't have a "Dancing On My Own" or a "Call Your Girlfriend" or maybe even a "Be Mine!," but its sleek heartbreak can still rewire your circuitry.
It's not easy to remain vital and curious and hungry when you're a beloved artist who's deep into your mid-forties. Sexistential might not hit quite as hard as Body Talk, but it's just as messy and passionate. Robyn's melodies still soar, and her beats still twinkle and boom. Even if it's not Robyn's best, Sexistential might be one of the most compulsively playable records that we get all year. Robyn is the version of Björk who will make an album about life as a fun, horny middle-aged single mom. As long as she remains this inspired, she can take all the time she wants.
Sexistential is out 3/27 on Konichiwa/Young.
