Nathan Lee
With her latest album, Sexistential, the artist enters her neurochemistry era.
Sexistential, by Robyn,
Young
• • •
That sound you heard last November when Robyn released “Dopamine,” the lead single off her new album Sexistential, was the collective gasp of an impassioned fandom losing their entire gay mind. Mother, to quote many a comment on Instagram posts announcing the drop, is back. Any number of pop stars are lavished with such adoration, many of whom—Lorde, Charli XCX, Jessie Ware, Carly Rae Jepsen—revere the Swedish icon. But there has always been something rare about the effect Robyn has on her fans, an unusually intimate tenor to the fervor she elicits. Polished to perfection but suffused with yearning and melancholy, her music effortlessly synthesizes the mandate of the twenty-first-century club hit with deeply moving, wholly credible vulnerability. Fembots, she once noted, have feelings, too; yet, for all her dalliance with sci-fi tropes and intergalactic metaphors, Robyn is our preeminent down-to-earth diva. She makes us feel mighty real.
If there is magic in the Robyn Mystique, there’s no real mystery. Alongside queers and peers, her third notable fan base may be music critics, who have exhaustively detailed her mastery of “crying on the dancefloor” bangers and, since the release of her breakthrough Body Talk album cycle in 2010, increasingly recognized her achievement and influence. Widely beloved on release, her supernova touchstone “Dancing on My Own” is now often ranked one of the best pop songs of all time. Other Body Talk standouts, like “Call Your Girlfriend,” “Indestructible,” and “Cry When You Get Older,” have endured as masterful, melancholy pop, the soundtrack to dancing all Saturday night but also sitting in your feels on a Wednesday afternoon.
Making good on its title, “Dopamine” is a deeply satisfying return to the Body Talk groove after the long hiatus since Honey, her splendidly wistful 2018 album. Opening with the rev of a cyborg whirring to life (Mother is back) then dissolving into a cluster of electronic sparkle and throb, the vocals slide in on classic Robyn vibes: “I know it’s just dopamine / but it feels so real to me.” Sexistential confirms that Robyn is in her neurochemistry era. An ecstatic, briskly paced record that gestated during Covid lockdown, Sexistential finds our queen feeling herself in new ways: a single mom who’s down to fuck. The title derives from a private joke between Robyn and her sister about making a “horny MILF album”—a feat amply demonstrated by the eponymous track. Over sparse electro beats, “Sexistential” raps about undergoing IVF treatment, scrolling through Instagram while breastfeeding, and having a “boner” for Adam Driver, among other shameless overshares. This is a wild choice for an advance single, and a stylistic outlier on an album that could otherwise pass as Body Talk Pt. 3. Yet it’s also something of a skeleton key to why, as Charli XCX posted on Robyn’s Insta, “there is NO ONE cooler.” If Robyn isn’t embarrassed to share thirsty momcore (“In my sweatpants and some juicy hentai”), she’s also savvy enough to shift the track into a crisp techno workout with a fierce earworm: “I like to go out / wear something nice / and push.”
Cover art for “Blow My Mind” single.
Robyn makes music when and how she wants. On Sexistential, she enlisted longtime producer Klas Åhlund to revive the Body Talk ethos, and several of the songs reach back decades. The ten-year evolution of “Dopamine” has nothing on “Blow My Mind,” a reworking of material off Robyn’s 2002 record Don’t Stop the Music. “Sucker for Love,” the closest thing to a filler track on an album with a winning hit-to-miss ratio, was first written during the making of Do It Again, her 2014 EP collaboration with Norwegian electro duo Röyksopp. So she did it again. Who are we to complain?
Album opener “Really Real” immediately quashes doubt that Robyn sounding like Robyn is anything but sheer joy. The body talks: “Tied up under your duvet / You’re mid performance, I’m planning my escape.” The production simmers and swells and detonates in a crescendo of bittersweet four on the floor. It really is real: a classic Robyn jam. Nature is healing.
In preparing this appraisal, I’ve been listening to Sexistential alone in my apartment. If Robyn, a single, middle-aged pop star, isn’t afraid to be a little cringe, then fuck it, neither will this single, middle-aged acolyte. More than once when studying “Talk to Me,” the LP’s rapturous highlight, I’ve broken into dance in my living room and found my eyes welling up with tears as Robyn soars over the drop. “Talk to Me” perfectly executes the Robyn formula with a Sexistential twist, its swirl of happy/sad emotions spiked with sexual innuendo: “I’m coming fast so guide me in / Just hit me up and talk to me, work up a vibe / Sometimes I get so lonely / So baby won’t you talk to me till I’ve arrived.” Okay, but why am I crying to a song about dirty talk? Doleful on the dancefloor and horny on main?
Robyn. Photo: Marili Andre.
Sexistential is more reinforcement than reinvention, and maybe that’s just what we need. I don’t know anyone who isn’t going through it these days—although I did recently discover, much to my surprise, that a friend who writes extensively about pop music isn’t a Robyn superfan. After incredulously asking “What kind of homosexual are you?” I tried to explain why her music means so much to me. There isn’t anything special to it, but there is a story, one I suspect is emblematic of the connection people feel to her.
In 2009, I moved to upstate New York for grad school and fell in love with a farmer. I met him at a transitional moment; recently home from his own graduate studies at Brown, he was unsure whether to devote himself to the family acreage or go into industry. Our first meeting was an online hookup. On our second date, he asked if he could bring his chainsaw in so it wouldn’t get stolen from his car. He was in the closet but had lived a vibrant gay life at college. We grew closer, hesitantly, our relationship largely siloed to the freedom of my apartment. We watched Drag Race and hung out with my dog and listened to Body Talk and twice drove to the city to see Robyn live. I could feel myself falling for him. I knew he felt the same. The closer we got, the more I realized that part of him was withholding, unable to fully commit to a Brooklyn artfag who was never going to be a farmer’s wife. At the time, and in years to come, we would talk about how our song was “Hang with Me.”
Will you tell me once again
How we’re gonna be just friends?
If you’re for real and not pretend
Then I guess you can hang with me
. . .
Just don’t fall
Recklessly, headlessly in love with me
’Cause it’s gonna be
All heartbreak
Blissfully painful and insanity
If we agree
Oh, you can hang with me
I broke up with him in 2011, and it broke my heart. I haven’t dated anyone since. To this day, I can’t listen to “Hang with Me” without being overcome by melancholy all mixed up with the memory of being in love. I don’t know if that’s sexistential. But it’s really real.
Nathan Lee is an assistant professor of film at Hollins University and a widely published critic.