The self-proclaimed Fembot has consistently pushed of us’s buttons. Robyn will likely be easiest identified for bringing raw emotion to the dancefloor, nonetheless her pop bangers about desire and despair are on the total spiked with commentary on social programming: “Inch me in and flip some switches,” she once quipped, posing as a sexed-up cyborg with a bloody, beating coronary heart. So it’s no longer a shock to gather the Swedish vital particular person in a lab coat on Dopamine, her first single in seven years. The song rushes with glittering, arpeggiated synths, nonetheless Robyn, now 46, holds it at arm’s length. “I understand it’s heavenly dopamine, nonetheless it undoubtedly feels so valid to me / I’m tripping on our chemistry,” she muses, taking notes as her synapses tingle. “Is love better than chemicals?” she looks to be asking. Does it topic if it’s no longer? But this time the song is now not any social critique – it’s a total fresh philosophy.

Sexistential, Robyn’s ninth album, unravels the fixation on romantic love that fuelled her greatest songs. Long gone are the tender edges and pulsing, sensual dwelling of her earlier album Honey, and reduction are the involving digital sounds of 2010’s Body Talk thru a fresh lens. With long-term collaborator Klas Åhlund and about a familiar faces (including Metronomy’s Joe Mount and Swedish pop royalty Max Martin), Sexistential reimagines Robyn’s discography with out romance as a automobile. The title notice is a sub-three-minute case peek in her fresh mentality. Over minimal, jerking 80s dwelling Robyn raps about hooking up whereas undergoing IVF as a solo mother or father: “Fuck a single mom, I’m no longer judgmental,” she winks, cleaving sex from copy and family unit. Its counterpart is Blow My Mind, a revamp of her billowy 2002 single made psychedelic, faster, sharper – no longer a textbook love song, nonetheless a song about loving her younger son.

Twisting a conventional Robyn trope, opener Essentially Real offers us the gory little print of a destroy-up. Under the covers, the singer realises “mid-efficiency” that a relationship is over, and a thumping, claustrophobic drum machine drives the song in direction of inevitable emotional give blueprint. But as a replacement of wrenching catharsis, it’s interrupted by a younger telephone name from her mom: glass shatters, electrical guitar roars, the area doesn’t cease. Straight out of 2010 (which, in Robyn terms, is now not any heinous thing), Sucker for Admire races over revved-up video-sport synths and lobs an emotional grenade at that ex: “Even as you happen to’re anxious, screech you’re anxious,” she dares. Even with its retro vocoder and Ministry of Sound piano, Consult with Me feels admire extra energizing ground: section treatment, section telephone sex, it takes a scalpel to a undoubtedly provoking need for validation.

As with any colossal philosophers, once in some time it’s demanding to apply Robyn’s argument. The album’s finale, Into the Solar, is a surging electro-ballad with the sonic trappings of victory, nonetheless tangled non secular imagery makes it tricky to parse – the uncommon Robyn song that leaves you unsure the build she stands. As an different, Sexistential’s defining moment falls on Dopamine. Throwing off that lab coat, Robyn doesn’t heavenly renounce to emotion, as on previous bangers, nonetheless finds a components to withhold two truths on the same time: emotions are chemical, and some emotions feel unbelievable. “After I let rush, it’s undoubtedly easy,” she spins, giddy, sooner than hitting a high display camouflage that comes straight from the intestine. Customarily, pleasure is as straightforward as frigid water on a hot day: clarifying, skin-tingling, distinguished.