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Sixteen years on from her magnum opus, Body Talk, Robyn’s influence looms large. Body Talk was dynamite that blasted open a career path for alt-pop stars. It bridged the bubblegum of the past and the broken-computer buzz of the future. And with “Dancing on My Own” and “Call Your Girlfriend,” it provided two massive heartbreak anthems that made dancing and crying the international pastime for at least two generations of youth (and more to come, so long as people keep rewatching Girls). Body Talk gave Robyn the world’s fattest blank check. What does she want now? She wants to sing a painfully beautiful song about phone sex. She wants to rap about scrolling Raya while doing IVF and making too many Etsy purchases while breastfeeding. She wants to get sexistential, and she does not care if we think that’s corny.
On the day she announced her ninth album, Sexistential, Robyn performed its title track on The Late Show in red leather pants and a single long bejeweled glove, humping the air and writhing to and fro, at one point setting the mic down and perching over it to coo, “My babymaker’s got 20 in the clip, ready to fire.” It was the perfect intro to the album, which celebrates the 46-year-old Swedish singer’s current mindset: horny, maternal, sentimental, a little crazy, and very, very free.
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Sexistential is a turn away from the sound of 2018’s Honey, the gauzy, tender collection of songs she made in the wake of the death of her close friend, the musician and producer Christian Falk, and a definitive turn back toward the sound of Body Talk. She’s once again working with longtime collaborator Klas Åhlund, with whom she’s spent over two decades exploring the depths of pulsating 16th-note synths; their signature blend of cyborg beats and melodic wistfulness is in full gear from the first chattering notes of “Really Real,” a song about realizing in the middle of sex that you’re no longer in love. If you’re worried this vibe might have gotten stale, there’s a scrambled hair metal guitar solo near the end to remind you that Robyn and Åhlund have never been in the business of being boring.
Some songs here have been plucked from Robyn’s back catalog and given a dusting up for the 2020s. The gently percolating “Sucker for Love” was originally written for the Do It Again EP, her 2014 collaboration with Röyksopp; “Blow My Mind,” which began its life as an electronica-meets-shoegaze highlight of 2002’s Don’t Stop the Music, has returned with a chic techno tinge, complete with a loping bassline reminiscent of Kraftwerk’s “The Robots.” In her album bio, Robyn describes the theme of the revamped “Blow My Mind” as “the sensuality between myself and my son that has nothing to do with sex… there’s a closeness, an intimacy and a kind of transparency that feels very sensual”—which perhaps shifts the meaning of the lyric “button down my shirt/Go on, make a mess” from the sticky nature of sex to the sticky nature of parenting. (The line “Lemme just crush your scrumptious little face” makes even more sense when sung to a baby rather than a guy.)
Robyn had her son in 2022, and minimal house track “Sexistential” sends up her experience of pursuing single motherhood through IVF: She celebrates not needing birth control for one-night stands (“Fuck a Plan B, baby, it’s no big deal”) and tells her doctor that Adam Driver would be her dream sperm donor; the doctor, mistaking Adam Driver for Adam Sandler, asks, “Wasn’t he great in Don’t Mess With the Zohan?”, a bungle with high stakes once you realize that in Sweden, your fertility clinic must choose your sperm donor for you. Anyone surprised by how kooky this song is has not been paying enough attention to Robyn’s whole deal. This is a woman who once threatened to “hammer your toe like a pediatrician,” who not too long ago bragged about having her “lyrics on your boobie”; she might be capable of ripping your heart in half, but she’s often as silly as she is sentimental. Pop music about motherhood has come a long way since Madonna’s maternal masterwork Ray of Light, with everyone from Halsey to Charli XCX confronting the complexities of having a baby these days, but Robyn’s unique circumstances let her approach the the idea of creating and sustaining life with her weird sense of humor very much intact. There’s something so tasty about that slightly demented drawl of a chorus, which somehow evokes both sex and childbirth at the same time: “I like to go out, wear something nice, and push.” It’s a little bit sexual, a little bit clinical, kind of weird, totally irresistible.
The production on Sexistential reflects this expansiveness. The classic Body Talk synth palpitations are there, but they’re enhanced with accoutrements that feel tactile and playful: radio dial sound effects, snippets of Spanish and Japanese, bass that revs like the engine of a souped-up car. Both “Blow My Mind” and the breakup jam “It Don’t Mean a Thing” make use of a deep, gravelly robot voice that adds equal parts gravitas and goofiness; the latter is a pensive relationship postmortem, with Robyn in a chatty R&B reverie: “I was your most devoted believer/In the passenger seat for the ride of my life/Know this time I was just waiting for you to get naked with me, baby.” And the meditative “Dopamine” turns the syllable “dope” into a repeated bass note that steadies a busy arrangement of arpeggiated synths, smacking drums, and laser pews. Pop music about neurochemistry has turned us all into amateur psychiatrists at this point, but Robyn finds a new layer of melancholy in that tantalizing molecule: “Nothing’s ever going to taste just as sweet/As when it is just out of reach.”
If there’s anything bad to say about Sexistential, it’s that it’s too damn short. Would we be greedy to ask for more than nine tracks after eight years? Maybe so. The portions are small, but the food is still delicious. The Max Martin collab “Talk to Me” is one of Robyn’s best songs ever, a bouncy dance track with a lovely, yearning chorus that deploys an elegant innuendo for orgasm by phone sex: “Sometimes I get so lonely/So baby, won’t you talk to me till I’ve arrived?” And the album ends with a pair of power ballads in the mode of her stirring Body Talk track “Indestructible”: the first, the arena-ready “Light Up,” teases its catharsis until the last possible minute; the second, “Into the Sun,” takes the astronaut motif Robyn playfully introduced on “Sexistential” (“My body’s a spaceship with the ovaries on hyperdrive”) and blows it up into a supersonic melodrama about being so committed to your mission that you end up getting lost in space all by yourself. “Look what I’ve done/So brave and dumb/Fly right into the sun,” Robyn sings over a roaring bass synth, her voice just as powerful as it was in the 1990s. “Did you really think I wouldn’t go all the way?”
In the end, Sexistential contains plenty of sex, but the “existential” bit ends up being even more important—after all these years, Robyn is still finding interesting new ways to explore the paradox she’s tackled throughout her career, which is that life is full of loneliness and heartbreak, but singing about it (and dancing about it) can make you feel a little less heartbroken and lonely. On “Into the Sun,” she’s going it alone, but she knows that in her wake, she’s leaving something for everyone to enjoy together.
