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“I know it’s just dopamine/ But it feels so real to me,” Robyn sings on “Dopamine,” the lead single off her new album Sexistential. Backed by a vocoder, a throbbing vocal sample, and a cleanly-sequenced synth line, Robyn explores the tension between chemistry and emotion, between cause and effect. How can something like sex, adoration, and desire feel so massive, when it’s only our bodies processing stimuli?
Robyn raises the question while also posing another, more metatextual query throughout the album: If it’s just dance pop, formed out of quantized rhythm and an unyielding electronic pulse, how can I push up against that rigidity? Where does it deviate; how can I force it to break? On Sexistential, Robyn revives her now-signature sound for another round of dance pop catharsis, but she can’t seem to stop herself from messing with the machinery.
Like all Robyn albums now, Sexistential arrives after a lengthy absence. In between Honey, her heartbreak-fueled 2018 record, and Sexistential, Robyn made it through a global pandemic, separated from her long-term partner, and gave birth to a son, whom she now raises as a single mother. There are some pretty obvious acknowledgments to her romantic situation throughout the album — certainly in the title track, where Robyn spits bars a la “Konichiwa Bitches” about trying to get some during IVF treatment, swiping on dating apps while breastfeeding, and how Adam Driver gives her “a boner.”
As the album’s title suggests, Sexistential’s primary entry point is the young rush of love and sensuality counterbalanced by Robyn’s newfound wisdom around long-term relationships, parenthood, and middle age. But in mining that tension, Robyn hones a more restless and complicated presentation of her usual synth pop euphoria; almost like she’s revisiting the hallowed halls of Body Talk University and deciding to graffiti the walls.
The opening track “Really Real” certainly achieves this anxious contrast. We’re not even 10 seconds in and there’s already a glitch in the arpeggio; by the time she arrives at the chorus (in a transition that feels like a fake-out with three extra bars, I might add), hi-hats skitter, the percussion sizzles, and the synths burn outside the song’s mechanistic groove. But Robyn and production partner Klas Åhlund up the ante with a particularly bizarre sequence: after answering a phone call from her mother and telling her to “just make yourself a cup of tea and go to bed,” Robyn introduces a squelching guitar solo that legitimately crashes the entire song. Somehow, after an effect akin to skipping around on a radio dial, the song falls back into a four-on-the-floor groove and fizzes through the final chorus.
There are several moments throughout Sexistential that are truly weird, like they’re conjured from a place both impulsive and remarkably vulnerable. The vocal samples blended into “Sucker for Love” are disorienting and occasionally funny; the “sucker” clip definitely sticks out, as it sounds like a robot saying “fucker” in the background of the mix. Those samples, along with wet, bubbly synths and a beefy drone sound that flies in out of nowhere during the verses, help make an outwardly sweet, ’80s-inflected earworm feel faintly unhinged.
“It Don’t Mean a Thing” follows, and reprises the same vocoder effect as “Dopamine.” But this time, Robyn dials it up past the point of comfort; the processing is so heavy it crosses from synthetic warmth into something genuinely unsettling. The effect certainly works with the song’s theme, which finds Robyn reflecting on the way two people can burn through the full arc of connection — desire, tenderness, inside jokes, the specific silliness only possible with someone you trust — only for the whole thing to dissolve into nothing. “All I wanted was for you to get silly with me,” she sings just a touch behind the beat, and it’s somehow the most vulnerable line on an album that includes a rap about IVF.
One of Sexistential’s most clever moments, though, arrives with “Blow My Mind,” a rework of her great 2002 track of the same name, now fashioned as a tribute to her three-year-old son. The original was purely about the physical joys of a relationship (the kind with mind-blowing climaxes), but now Robyn is conflating that feeling with the raw emotion of motherhood. Beyond the novelty of its new premise, the track earns its re-contextualization. The original’s breathless physical charge hasn’t been softened so much as revved up and redirected; the mind-blowing thing now is that this person exists at all, and that she made him.
Not all of Sexistential’s nine tracks are as risky or weird. The Max Martin-produced “Talk to Me” is the album’s cleanest pop moment, with Robyn pining for some mental stimulation over a slick, syncopated bass line and an infectious groove. It’s no “Dancing on My Own” or “Missing You,” but it lands firmly in banger territory; meanwhile, the concluding two tracks, “Light Up” and “Into the Sun,” aren’t quite as evocative or imaginative. The former features a clever production moment in the chorus where Robyn’s voice strobes between sawtooth synths, but the lyrics — “Light up the way to your heart” — aren’t exactly gut punchers.
It’s a real pleasure to hear Robyn embrace a more restless production style and raise the stakes on her own formula. Throughout Sexistential, the synths bubble and slide outside the meter, the rhythms pound and throb before shapeshifting, and Robyn’s voice — a terrific instrument in and of itself — expands and contracts, turning from alien to deeply human within seconds. Eight years is a long time to wait, but Robyn returns having clearly figured out that the formula isn’t something to protect — it’s something to push.
English (US) · 