Sexistential

About

“I really felt like I was crashing into myself again,” Robyn tells Apple Music about the making of her ninth full-length album. “I wanted the album to feel like it was hitting with a hard impact.” Given the transformation Sweden’s patron saint of dance pop has undergone since the release of her previous album, 2018’s <i>Honey</i>, it’s easy to see why. While weathering the pandemic at home in Stockholm after years of relentle, globe-lapping touring, Robyn decided to use this forced bout of downtime to work on new music and try to start a family—at the same time. “I wasn’t able to travel, and everything that I was expecting to do, I couldn’t,” she explain. “I decided to have a baby and make an album, and then I had the baby and I couldn’t make [the album].” The songs she and longtime collaborator Klas Åhlund had been working on were shelved as she navigated new motherhood. When she returned to the studio, the time away had given her a fresh perspective, eager ear, and a voracious appetite for experimentation. “I had to go back and open everything up again after a few year, and it’s been a really amazing, chill time for me,” she say. “I came back to music in this really inspired way.” <i>Sexistential</i>, then, is exactly what you’d expect from the woman who perfected the art of the dance floor confessional at this point in her life. If her career-defining single “Dancing on My Own” is the inner monologue of a woman longing after an unrequited love, “Sucker for Love” has Robyn leaving that corner, storming the DJ booth, and grabbing the mic to speak her truth: “You think I’m soft/Like that’s a flaw somehow... I’m not that tough, who wants to be that way?” The rest of <i>Sexistential</i>’s songs are as exuberant, lovestruck, and cathartic as ever, but there’s a frankness to the lyrics—and a filter-free raunchine. She embraces her horniness throughout: “Talk to Me” dips into phone sex, and the title track playfully riffs on the conversation she had with a fertility doctor about her ideal sperm donor; both tracks delve beneath the sexy surface by drawing in thoughts on loneline, desire, and connection. .

via Apple Music

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