Robyn: Sexistential Album Review | Pitchfork

Robyn had her son in 2022, and minimal house track “Sexistential” sends up her experience of pursuing single motherhood through IVF: She celebrates not needing birth control for one-night stands (“Fuck a Plan B, baby, it’s no big deal”) and tells her doctor that Adam Driver would be her dream sperm donor; the doctor, mistaking Adam Driver for Adam Sandler, asks, “Wasn’t he great in Don’t Mess With the Zohan?”, a bungle with high stakes once you realize that in Sweden, your fertility clinic must choose your sperm donor for you. Anyone surprised by how kooky this song is has not been paying enough attention to Robyn’s whole deal. This is a woman who once threatened to “hammer your toe like a pediatrician,” who not too long ago bragged about having her “lyrics on your boobie”; she might be capable of ripping your heart in half, but she’s often as silly as she is sentimental. Pop music about motherhood has come a long way since Madonna’s maternal masterwork Ray of Light, with everyone from Halsey to Charli XCX confronting the complexities of having a baby these days, but Robyn’s unique circumstances let her approach the the idea of creating and sustaining life with her weird sense of humor very much intact. There’s something so tasty about that slightly demented drawl of a chorus, which somehow evokes both sex and childbirth at the same time: “I like to go out, wear something nice, and push.” It’s a little bit sexual, a little bit clinical, kind of weird, totally irresistible.

The production on Sexistential reflects this expansiveness. The classic Body Talk synth palpitations are there, but they’re enhanced with accoutrements that feel tactile and playful: radio dial sound effects, snippets of Spanish and Japanese, bass that revs like the engine of a souped-up car. Both “Blow My Mind” and the breakup jam “It Don’t Mean a Thing” make use of a deep, gravelly robot voice that adds equal parts gravitas and goofiness; the latter is a pensive relationship postmortem, with Robyn in a chatty R&B reverie: “I was your most devoted believer/In the passenger seat for the ride of my life/Know this time I was just waiting for you to get naked with me, baby.” And the meditative “Dopamine” turns the syllable “dope” into a repeated bass note that steadies a busy arrangement of arpeggiated synths, smacking drums, and laser pews. Pop music about neurochemistry has turned us all into amateur psychiatrists at this point, but Robyn finds a new layer of melancholy in that tantalizing molecule: “Nothing’s ever going to taste just as sweet/As when it is just out of reach.”

If there’s anything bad to say about Sexistential, it’s that it’s too damn short. Would we be greedy to ask for more than nine tracks after eight years? Maybe so. The portions are small, but the food is still delicious. The Max Martin collab “Talk to Me” is one of Robyn’s best songs ever, a bouncy dance track with a lovely, yearning chorus that deploys an elegant innuendo for orgasm by phone sex: “Sometimes I get so lonely/So baby, won’t you talk to me till I’ve arrived?” And the album ends with a pair of power ballads in the mode of her stirring Body Talk track “Indestructible”: the first, the arena-ready “Light Up,” teases its catharsis until the last possible minute; the second, “Into the Sun,” takes the astronaut motif Robyn playfully introduced on “Sexistential” (“My body’s a spaceship with the ovaries on hyperdrive”) and blows it up into a supersonic melodrama about being so committed to your mission that you end up getting lost in space all by yourself. “Look what I’ve done/So brave and dumb/Fly right into the sun,” Robyn sings over a roaring bass synth, her voice just as powerful as it was in the 1990s. “Did you really think I wouldn’t go all the way?”

In the end, Sexistential contains plenty of sex, but the “existential” bit ends up being even more important—after all these years, Robyn is still finding interesting new ways to explore the paradox she’s tackled throughout her career, which is that life is full of loneliness and heartbreak, but singing about it (and dancing about it) can make you feel a little less heartbroken and lonely. On “Into the Sun,” she’s going it alone, but she knows that in her wake, she’s leaving something for everyone to enjoy together.