Over a two-decade career, Robyn has made some of pop’s most propulsive, bulletproof bangers – not least ‘Dancing On My Own’, an eternal, iconic anthem about forging your own path out of heartbreak. On her ninth album ‘Sexistential’, though, we find her unmoored and questioning, the end of a long-term relationship having catalysed the explosion of everything she thought she knew about love, life, sexuality, motherhood and more besides.
Robyn invites us to journey with her through the unravelling. With a deceptively purposeful strut that evokes the bionic pop of ‘Body Talk’, opening track ‘Really Real’ marches us into an ambivalent sex scene – “You’re mid-performance, I’m planning my escape… I want to swallow but it ain’t the same” – that descends into a vulnerable late-night call to mum. As she signs off, reality cracks open with a screeching guitar solo (a thrilling reminder that Prince was one of the artistic north stars for this album). It’s a brilliant, cinematic start to an idiosyncratic adventure – one that she has likened to a spaceship crashing through the atmosphere at high speed – the kind only Robyn could embark on.
Written with a smaller circle of collaborators due to pandemic lockdowns, ‘Sexistential’ sometimes feels like a time-travelling whistle-stop tour through Robyn’s different eras. ‘Blow My Mind’ is effectively a cover of the song of the same name from her 2002 album ‘Don’t Stop The Music’, a seduction-turned-ode to her son and his “scrumptious little face”. The prancing ‘Sucker For Love’ began as a co-write with Norwegian electro mavens Röyksopp for their joint 2014 EP ‘Do It Again’. She started writing the gorgeous, cresting ‘Dopamine’ a decade ago (which usefully contextualises the Taio Cruz writing credit). But nothing here feels ill-fitting, which is testament to the steady, seasoned collaboration between Robyn and Klas Åhlund, as well as ‘Sexistential’’s capacious vision.
Post-‘Honey’, Robyn is looser, more limber; this is an album about feeling everything all at once. Different points of view jostle on ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing’, an understated mid-record stunner with production and songwriting credits by Addison Rae collaborator Elvira Anderfjärd. Robyn veers between a vocoder mantra of denial (“It don’t mean a thing / It don’t matter at all”), brave-face asides to her ex and direct emotional devastation. “You cut my flowers, I loved you like sin, true love forever / Stupid forever” feels free-associative, like it could have ripped out of a tear-soaked diary. In “deprogramming from the sect of love”, as she put it in the album bio, Robyn has arrived at some of her most vivid writing about the subject.
We swing then to ‘Talk To Me’, a heat-seeking missile of pure pop perfection and her first co-write with Max Martin since 2010 – and swerve to the scintillating title track, a horny IVF rap packed with glorious quotables (“Fuck a app!”) and an incredible anecdote of her fertility doctor confusing Adam Driver and Adam Sandler. Longtime Robyn fans won’t be fazed by ‘Sexistential’, having seen her unserious side over the years in ‘Konichiwa Bitches’, ‘Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do’ and ‘Beach 2k20’. But she’s never been so forthrightly silly (though “now my lyrics on your booby” from Robyn and Yung Lean’s remix of Charli XCX’s ‘360’ should have been a hint it was coming). It’s one of the shortest singles Robyn has ever released, and certainly one of the goofiest, but ‘Sexistential’ is a blaze of audacity that invigorates the whole record.
Hankering for a one-night stand while 10 weeks pregnant, on ‘Sexistential’ Robyn memorably declares: “My body’s a spaceship with my ovaries on hyperdrive.” She sees the metaphor through on dramatic closing track ‘Into The Sun’, where she imagines herself as a stubborn rocket pilot chasing righteous obliteration. There’s no frisson to the self-destruction here, only the cold inevitability of interstellar tragedy. The air of finality is unmistakable – the questing of ‘Sexistential’ is over. Only time will tell where Robyn heads next.
