Eight years is a long time to wait for a Robyn album, especially when her absence has only made her fingerprints more visible across a contemporary dance-pop world now ruled by the likes of Charli xcx. In the interim, entire scenes have absorbed her lessons about emotional directness without melodrama and club music that simultaneously thinks and feels, but often without matching her clarity or nerve.
Thankfully, Sexistential (Young) arrives not as a nostalgia exercise or victory lap, but as proof that Robyn’s particular synthesis of pleasure, vulnerability and pop rigor remains maddeningly hard to replicate. If anything, it lands with the calm authority of someone who knows the room has been holding its breath to hear what she’s been cooking up in her Stockholm laboratory for most of the past decade with producers such as Klas Åhlund and Oscar Holter.
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That confidence is established immediately on opener “Really Real,” which drops you into a French Touch churn of rubbery bass and bumping beats, accented by strange guitar squeals and disorienting, munchkin-voiced exclamations. Lyrically, it’s bracing in its intimacy of chronicling the exact second a relationship disintegrates, which is rendered with erotic candor and emotional recoil. “You’re mid-performance / I’m planning my escape / Right there when you call my name / I want to swallow but it ain’t the same,” she sings with coolly devastating effect, as the Tron: Legacy-era Daft Punk pulse resists settling into anything comforting.
“Dopamine” follows with a propulsive melody and stacked, treated vocals that subtly echo the muscular melancholy of Robyn’s immortal 2010 hit “Dancing on My Own,” recasting romantic intensity as both chemical and cosmic. This duality — knowing exactly what something is yet still surrendering to how it feels — runs throughout the album. “Blow My Mind” leans into that abandon most overtly, pairing Auto-tuned vocals and increasingly alien sound design with lyrics that are gleefully raunchy and disarmingly sweet. “Ravish me, tear into my flesh / button down my shirt / go on, make a mess,” she coos, collapsing sex, affection and awe into the same sultry breath.
The album’s cultural flashpoint title track earns its hype less through shock than through sheer fluency. Robyn raps (really well!), overshares about one-night stands while on IVF and “scrolling on my feed while breastfeeding” and philosophizes with a looseness that feels radical precisely because of who she is: a woman in her mid-40s refusing discretion as a form of dignity. It’s messy, funny, horny and alive, and that openness provides Sexistential its biggest jolt.
Not every track hits with equal force. “Sucker for Love,” salvaged from sessions for a 2014 EP with Norwegian dance mavens Röyksopp, feels comparatively undercooked, its sentiments familiar without as much melodic or production panache to elevate them. But even minor Robyn songs gain friction from her voice, which remains peerless in its ability to reverberate inside your head and from halfway across the dance floor.
By the time closer “Into the Sun” dissolves, Sexistential feels less like a comeback than a recalibration. In an industry that still polices female desire by age and tone, Robyn sings, fucks and doubts out loud, at full volume. This is what freedom actually sounds like, and why the world has been waiting for Sexistential for so long. Odds are that you’re dancing along with it right now.
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