On last year's collaboration with Röyksopp, Do It Again, and 2010's Body Talk, Robyn made the dance floor her therapy couch, singing of breakups, feeling like a broken cyborg, and all the shit that was killing her over addictive electro-pop. It's exactly this bruised-but-headstrong expertise, built up over two decades as a writer and performer, that imbues Robyn's music with a sort of welcoming trust. So, when she takes a step back in the thumping opening track of Love Is Free, "Lose Control", to say, "Hey, tell me all about your mistakes/ Tell me 'bout the love and the pain/ I know somebody hurt you some way," you might believe her and give it all up.
On this debut EP with new music group La Bagatelle Magique, formed with her keyboardist Markus Jägerstedt and the late producer and Swedish club music veteran Christian Falk, Robyn cuts to the chase with what she wants from you (and herself). La Bagatelle Magique aren't trying to reinvent the wheel here. The group is meddling in music history, cranking out five familiar tracks that are too hard not to dance to.
"Got to Work It Out" plays like an amped up, big beat version of Debbie Deb's 1983 single "When I Hear Music", with a twinkling, childlike xylophone melody buried under the track's trance-y basslines and Vocodered, aggressive vocals. And the standout single featuring rising singer Maluca, "Love Is Free", is ballroom-ready, steeped in a yippy, acid house groove that finds Robyn asserting physical boundaries while preaching free love. "Imma give it to you baby/ Imma give it when I'm ready," she raps over the beat.
A charming, un-slick outlier here is "Tell You (Today)", an eccentric, sample-heavy Loose Joints cover that mashes together instrumentals of the genre (horns, Heatwave-approved harp, disco lasers, etc.) to dizzying effect. The song sounds like someone was smashing their hands against a well-stocked sampler, even when it comes to Robyn's vocals. They're a little stilted in their delivery, as if every word was programmed on its own and played back to form sentences, but the lyrics still reel with the excitement of finally telling someone how much you love them.
What Love Is Free does so well, and so simply, is hone in on just the beauty of finally letting go, physically and mentally. On "Set Me Free", there's a moment when the lyric "Free your body" repeats, getting clearer and clearer until it just hangs there in the middle of the track while the kick-drum pounds after it, punctuating it like a stream of trailing periods. For Robyn and La Bagatelle Magique*,* the simple request might not be the answer to all your problems, but it's sure as hell the start.
