Sexistential, by Robyn
Madonna or Prince should have coined an album title like Sexistential decades ago, but it falls to one of their spiritual heiresses, Robyn, to claim it. As a doyenne of modern and independent pop, the Swedish singer finds beguiling ways to live up to the title.
Eight years after her previous album, Honey, she does not defy trends; she merely continues to do her own thing while trends wax and wane. With producer Klas Åhlund once again at her right hand, she delivers nine addictive songs of anticipation, desire, disappointment, and fulfillment.
Robyn manifests within electronic dance music as a vivacious hyperintelligence capable of making the beat of her heart distinct from the beats of the songs. Even the midst of emotional confusion, she sings with unshowy attention to melody and the clarity of a woman who knows herself well.
Writing (and dancing) on her own or with Åhlund, hitmaker Max Martin, and English producer and performer Taio Cruz (among others), Robyn confidently resumes her place among currently infamous peers and successors like Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter, and with considerably more life experience than they have.
She brings tingling authority to the pleasure obsession of “Dopamine” and its keyboard droplets and drum-machine spatters; alternately rushes and slows down her thoughts about an old relationship in “It Don’t Mean a Thing” with serious 1980s disco-pop silliness a la Prince; and skulks seductively toward the dawn in “Into the Sun” to match pace with its mirrorshades-and-neon glide.
The mood spectrum stretches from the title track, on which Robyn rides nothing but a bareback rhythm while rapping about horniness and IVF, to “Blow My Mind,” a track from 2002 she has rewritten to surround her toddler son with adoration.
Along the rest of the spectrum, Robyn lets Sexistential be as deep or shallow, as fast or slow, as hard or soft, as the listener might crave or need.
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Get Sexistential on Amazon here.
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