Honey

About

If Robyn has found peace or happine, you wouldn’t necessarily know it by listening to her first album in eight year. Opener “Missing U” sets the mood, with wistful lines about stopped clocks and empty spaces left behind. Yet it’s somehow one of <i>Honey</i>’s more upbeat track, with an insistent rhythm and glittery arpeggios that recall the brightest moments of 2010’s <i>Body Talk</i>. At its best, Robyn’s music has always straddled the line between club-ready dance and melancholy pop, and her strongest singles to date, “Dancing On My Own” and “Be Mine!,” strike this balance perfectly. But never before have we heard the kind of emotional intensity that possesses <i>Honey</i>; in the years leading up to it, Robyn suffered through the 2014 death of longtime collaborator Christian Falk and a breakup with her partner Max Vitali (though they’ve since reunited). A few one-off projects aside, she mostly withdrew from music and public life, so <i>Honey</i> is a comeback in more ways than one. Produced with a handful of collaborator, like Kindness’ Adam Bainbridge and Metronomy’s Joseph Mount, the album mostly abandons the disco of "Missing U," opting to pair Robyn’s darker lyrics with more understated, house-influenced texture. She gives in to nostalgia on “Because It’s in the Music” (“They wrote a song about u...Even though it kills me, I still play it anyway”) and gets existential on “Human Being” (“Don’t shut me out, you know we’re the same kind, a dying race”). .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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