Who would think to link motherhood to the club? Even just the suggestion is unorthodox enough as to feel subversive and thrilling. On Sexistential’s title track, Swedish alt-pop mother Robyn sings about middle age and parenting with a refreshing, horny candor that’s pretty much unheard-of in modern pop music: “Fuck a Plan B, baby, it’s no big deal / I’m already ten weeks in maternity.” She confesses to hanging around in her sweatpants with some “juicy hentai,” swiping through Raya while on IVF, scrolling Instagram Reels and breastfeeding, doing way too much Etsy impulse shopping. A vibrating house beat—so spartan that, at times, all you hear is a kick drum beneath Robyn’s rapping—lends the track the unfiltered intimacy of an off-the-cuff voice note. Yet the song’s most telling moment arrives in its chorus, when Robyn moans: “I like to go out / Wear something nice, and push.” This is sweaty clubs, sticky dance floors, the heat of the moment; yet the way Robyn delivers push makes it hard not to feel it’s all a pregnancy double entendre.
Then again, who else but Robyn to pull this thread? After all, the dance floor is where she’s always been most at home. The 46-year-old star first got her start as a teen in Sweden’s pop machine, but she became an alt-pop legend with 2010’s Body Talk trilogy, whose metallic synth-pop gems—including canon millennial hit “Dancing On My Own”—cemented her status as the patron saint and poet laureate of heartbreak on the dance floor. 2018’s Honey, which addressed both the reconciliation of her engagement to director Max Vitali and the death of her close friend and producer Christian Falk, mined the world of house music to create a sensual, sublime record of grief, perseverance, and passion.
Sexistential, crafted alongside longtime collaborator Klas Åhlund, marks a return to the mechanistic synth-pop of Body Talk. But Robyn, of course, is not the same young woman she was back then, and her dance floor dispatches have matured with age. Much has happened in the intervening years: she split with Vitali, and after wrapping up her Honey tour, Robyn returned to Sweden, expecting to start work on a new album and begin IVF. Shortly after, though, the pandemic hit, and Robyn couldn’t travel to the States, where she’d previously frozen her eggs in her mid-30’s. So she had to start the process all over again. Eventually, in 2022, she gave birth to her son Tyko, who she’s been raising since as a single mom.
Being a mother lends Robyn a new perspective on her usual studies of love and the dance floor. On ‘’Sexistential,” the clubby physicality of sweaty, pushing bodies is also extended to Robyn’s surprise at the newfound sensation of her own body after undergoing IVF: “My body’s a spaceship with the ovaries on hyperdrive / Got a whole universe inside that exists in between my thighs.” Skin-on-skin, too, takes on a different register when you’ve got a child in your embrace; no longer is it purely the domain of night-out hedonism and dancing close to a stranger. “Blow My Mind” revamps an old Robyn song from 2002’s Don’t Stop the Music, tweaking the subject from romantic attraction to motherly love. Over a muscular techno beat, Robyn’s luminous robotic voice is wondrous even of the experience of breastfeeding: “Baby, ravish me / Tear into my flesh / Button down my shirt / Go on, make a mess.” Still, the promise at the song’s end—“I’ll do anything for you”—isn’t so different from a dance floor declaration of love.
This is not to say that there aren’t great tracks on here that hit with all the hallmarks of a classic Robyn banger. There are many. “Talk To Me,” her first collaboration with pop maestro Max Martin in over a decade, is all about the giddy delights of phone sex. Synths rev like racetrack engines, racing to the edge before Robyn’s unbearable release: “I’m coming fast so guide me in!” “Really Real,” meanwhile, captures the moment of realizing a relationship is falling apart while you’re still in bed with them. And “Sucker for Love” is just another riff on the brokenhearted, scrappy courage that’s always been at the core of Robyn’s persona. She asks what’s so wrong with falling again and again, underscored by twinkly, plinky synth keys: “I’m not that tough / Who wants to be that way? / I’m just a sucker for love.” Even if Robyn could have thicker skin and a bulletproof soul, she’d still choose to let love in. With all its wistful yet hard-edged lightness, the track sounds like an affirmation that even when heartbreak hurts, it’s a reminder that you’re still alive. (As we’ve all recently heard: the one who’s in love always wins.)
While making Sexistential, Robyn realized that she might never find the capital-R Romance she’d been searching for on all her old records. Yet that didn’t mean love itself would be absent from her life; it would simply take on looser, more ambiguous forms. You can hear this best on “Dopamine,” a pure pop lodestone beaming and radiating with passion. Synth lasers inject straight into the veins like drugs while a robotic voice chants “dope dope dope dope” with the insistence of a heartbeat. Robyn knows that this might not be real, but she chooses to believe in it anyway: “I know it’s just dopamine, but it feels so real to me.” After all, isn’t this what love is all about? How it transforms you, as if birthing a new being within you? Love, motherhood, dance floor salvation: how they each make a new life of you. [Young]
Lydia Wei is a writer based in DC. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Pitchfork, Washingtonian, Washington City Paper, and elsewhere. Find her online at lydia-wei.com.
