Who knew that what pop music really needed was a song about hornily perusing dating apps while doing IVF?
That's what Robyn delivers on the funny title track of her ninth studio album Sexistential, out March 27, a song that chronicles her journey conceiving her son as a solo parent (joking with her doctor that her dream donor might be hunky actor Adam Driver) and scrolling the Internet in sweatpants, calling out for "some IRL" and "your ASL" in between impulse buying stuff on Etsy she doesn't need. "My body's a spaceship with the ovaries on hyperdrive," she raps, somehow of our mundane, smartphone world and yet also hovering above us, an alien recalculating her relationship to Earth.
For most of her career Robyn has sought to deconstruct the aims of a contemporary pop singer, wriggling her way out of a commercial teen idol career beginning in the 1990s with hits like "Show Me Love." In the mid 2000s, with the help of left-field Swedish groups like The Knife and Röyksopp, she remade herself into what would become the blueprint for so many stars in the decade following: a steely, self-proclaimed "fembot with feelings too" who could turn raw, human vulnerability into larger-than-life synthpop hits like "Be Mine" and "Call Your Girlfriend."
But for the last decade, Robyn's been chipping away at her reputation for being so many millennials' resident dancefloor therapist. She ventured deeper into club music with her 2015 side project La Bagatelle Magique and 2018's long-teased Honey, which focused on slow-building grooves and sparse production that begged to be mixed into DJ sets rather than replicating the expected chorus and verse beats of a stereotypical hit.
And now she's back, nearly eight years after her last full-length album with Sexistential, with a restless album that continues the humanizing ethos of Honey but revisits the punchy, dramatic electropop of her most enduring songs. Sexistential is about sex, a topic the artist says has only become more emboldened and complex in her work as she gets older. But it's also about Robyn's relationship to pleasure at this point in her life, following the breakup of a long relationship and the artist pursuing single parenthood, and, as she says, "all the contradictions before and burning down ideas that didn't fit the situation I was in."
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Hazel Cills: You have talked about this album being the product of feeling like you were floating around in space and asking yourself big existential questions, and that this album felt like crashing down to earth for you. What were those big existential questions for you? What was that floating in space feeling coming from?
Robyn: I think it really was about letting go of a lot of control, and that's what the floating around in space feeling is trying to describe. I always knew I wanted to be a parent. I hoped it would happen in a relationship. I came out of a long relationship and just kind of had to renegotiate a lot of things. That was a process in itself, but it also coincided with the pandemic and with getting older. I started planning for having a family of my own by myself, but then I didn't know if that was going to be possible. I faced a lot of fears and I think getting ready to kind of just strip yourself down to the bare minimum of what you expected your life to be is a very sobering process. And also really empowering, like learning how to kind of exist within something that feels very uncertain and something that you didn't expect can also be very liberating.
I just started from a new point in my life. I think we all do that a few times in our lives. It's normal. But I think previously I've connected that process to sadness and something much darker. And this time it was very empowering and also made me reassess a part of how I've made music over the years. I looked at this character that I had built up a couple of times, this heartbroken, lonely cowboy — the person in "Dancing on My Own." I looked at her and it felt really cringey and embarrassing for a long time to be so sad. [Laughs] And then I learned how to appreciate her and the skill that she has to survive and that skill is actually really useful. I think the reason why a lot of people connect to "Dancing on My Own" is that there's something very real in that feeling of loneliness, at the end of the day. Nobody really knows why we're here. It's just a very big part of being human, this illusion of control.
You mentioned becoming a parent, which is something that you did solo with IVF. You sing about that on this album in the title track, and that's a song that does play very liberatory — a song that's full of pleasure and entering this unknown space in your life. Can you tell me about the moment where you said, 'OK, I'm going to do this on my own'?
I think I always prepared for it and I was really scared of that option having to be used. But the actual decision came during the pandemic. We were all quarantining and I was just really supported by friends and family and people who were like, if I could do it again and I had to do it on my own, I totally would. It was this unexpected opening into a new way of looking at something that I thought I was going to be really saddened by. And it didn't feel at all like what I expected. For me, the experience was much more complex and addictive and interesting and weird and hilarious and kind of extreme.
You've also said there's this idea with the album that "the purpose of your life is to stay horny." Is that a fairly recent revelation for you or is that something that you've always thought as an artist?
I've always thought that. But I can think about what it's like to be a younger woman and not feeling safe to express your sensuality or sexuality — your needs. It was harder for me, especially as an artist in the '90s in a very commercial part of the music industry; it was a disgusting environment in a lot of ways and a very depressing environment to express these things in. There was no receiver, no playfulness around it and nothing that supported me in that. I think for a lot of women and also for a lot of people, it comes later on in life when there's not as much at stake. You're not as vulnerable. There's a sense of safety there.
But the horniness is not necessarily always connected to sex, although I also think that it is. Maybe sometimes it's just the simple thing of when I feel good in my body is also when I feel sensual. When I feel relaxed or when there's a sense of freedom. Sometimes you have to grab that space for yourself and not expect it to be given to you. That means sometimes also being a little bit carefree, like maybe you're being a little bit careless. I think to do that, for me, [it] was easier when I knew how to trust myself.
I've always thought of you as an artist who puts all of their humanity into pop music, especially the experience of being a woman. It's interesting to think about your background, coming up in that era of the industry where it felt like there was a very specific, limited way that women could express themselves in pop music. How do you keep the humanity in your music as a pop songwriter? How do you keep all of that desire, heartbreak, those revelations in the music?
As you're saying this, I'm thinking about it as well. Like, how do I do that? My thoughts just travel to this distance between me and how I am perceived. And that space is always negotiated, right? In your relationship with someone, or between you and how you think you're perceived in your profession, or in your family.
Maybe I was aware of it early on because I was famous earlier. I didn't have a lot of anonymity when I was younger. So I became aware of this kind of transit in between my own experience and other people's experience. That just always felt like comedy to me. That's where the performance happens. That's where the trolling happens. [Laughs] I always felt like there's this drag aspect to performing a female role. It was so claustrophobic for me when I was younger but now it feels interesting to play with. Like this is what being a woman, what having a vagina, makes me do or makes me feel.
I think I was always talking about it, like even "Fembot." I didn't understand it myself but — bodily functions, what am I supposed to do with this? This awareness of how I need to melt all these things together and how that's going to look like; for me, that's the negotiation. When I'm able to define it, when I'm able to decide what that's going to sound like or be like, that's when I feel human. That's when I don't feel like a stereotype of something. In music, I get to decide what that's going to look like. And for me, the reality is always much more complex, and in a way undefinable. When it's both happy and sad, when it's both light and heavy, the combination and the contradictions make it more real.
Your last album, Honey, was such a light, airy side of you. I always think about you singing on that album, "I'm a human being." But I hear a little bit of the "Fembot" instrumentally on this album. I hear the Body Talk sound creeping in, even if the things that you're singing about are different. Can you tell me about your vision for how you wanted this album to sound versus what you did on Honey?
The building blocks of the sound of this album were there way before the lyrics or the subject matter. I didn't know that I was going to write about trying to become a parent and IVF and my body. If somebody would have told me that three years ago, I probably would have been like, ew. But it became interesting when I was making the album.
It started from this need of defining contrast and duality. I had two entrance points, one was [purely] musical. There's a song that I always try to write that is a kind of pop song that's based on classic guitar riffs. It's a song that Bruce Springsteen knows how to write. It's a song that Prince wrote over and over again, but especially on Dirty Mind. AC/DC, even. It has its roots in so many different styles of music, but when it materializes in pop music, what's so cool about it is that you can dress it in any suit you like. And the suit I was trying, if it was a motorbike it wasn't a Harley Davidson. It was like a very colorful Kawasaki. Like, "Light Up" [from Sexistential], I hope someday I get to record it with an artist that can make it the way it sounded when we wrote it.
But then this even more nerdy thing of honoring music that I grew up with, that didn't focus so much on heavy bass. A lot of times in modern pop music, there's these long bass notes that kind of kill all the white noise or the beautiful space that exists in between notes. I wanted to have less bass, have more rhythm, and have a more conversational singing tone. In "Dopamine" it's like I'm really trying to talk to someone, but then there's a melody in there too, and it's like you're hijacking the brain. When I entered into all these things that I wrote about without thinking about, I realized that in order for me to make this interesting it has to be so specific. And "Dancing on My Own" is much more abstract. It's a broader feeling.
For "Sexistential," I know that you were inspired by Andre 3000 a bit and an interview where he talked about his jazz flute album and he was like, 'well, people don't want to hear me rapping about my colonoscopy.' And you were like, I would want to hear that. There are so many personal, deep moments on this album. How do you toe the line between making pop music that anyone can come to and hear themselves in, and then making personal, vulnerable work?
A good description of a colonoscopy is always going to be interesting, right? A bad description is going to be really bad. I believe Andre 3000 is a genius and I think he could make anything interesting. But I just think that what you allow yourself to talk about is really up to you and sometimes you're just not in that space. For me, it was interesting to go there. I said in the beginning, the things that might have felt cringey or like it owned me or had defined me before, I came back to it with no expectation. And I deliberately and intentionally placed her, this archetype that I was tired of, this sad person, I could place her on the table and be like, this is what she's going to do this time. I understand what she's doing now. And then it felt interesting to me again.
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