Robyn, on Her Own
A few minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve, the Brooklyn Paramount was vibrating at capacity, crammed with very alert gay guys, gently aging party girls, and a grab bag of other Zohran Mamdani voters seeking that rare dance-floor transposition of uncertainty into bliss. The Paramount, which opened almost a century ago and holds a few thousand people, was recently restored to its neo-Baroque glory—its gilded ceiling, arching eighty feet high, strobed with light. Everyone was there to see Robyn, the Swedish pop star, and she stepped just then into a d.j. booth, wearing a one-shouldered black top. Her set wouldn’t start for another hour; in the meantime, she would ring in the New Year with her fans. She hadn’t performed in New York City since 2019, which felt like a long time ago.
Robyn is forty-six. She’s best known for “Dancing on My Own,” a 2010 hit with a never-ending half-life—a generational floor-filler on the level of “I Will Survive” or “Don’t Stop Believin’.” (You know it: I’m in the corner / Watchin’ you kiss her, oh-oh-oh!) The song, which Robyn performed last year with David Byrne for the fiftieth anniversary of “Saturday Night Live,” converts despairing lyrics into a rapturous thrill. Byrne told me recently, of the song, “What’s interesting is the insistent pulse that says, ‘You’ll be all right, the music will lift you, keep going.’ Triumph over adversity. Songs can do that—immerse us in the problem and its solution at the same time.”
“Dancing on My Own” was the first single from “Body Talk,” a trilogy of albums, all released a few months apart, on which Robyn’s artistic signature became unmistakable: sorrow as the content, ecstasy as the form. Listening to her music, you’re not enveloped in the minutiae of her emotional universe, as you are with someone like Taylor Swift. Rather, Robyn will extract from her universe the simplest of plots—a pure love, thwarted—and then expand it to encompass everything. Her voice, tensile and clear, is an ideal delivery system for longing; it makes me picture melted sugar hardening on ice. “You don’t need to compress it or shape it,” Svein Berge, a longtime collaborator of Robyn’s and one half of the electronic duo Röyksopp, told me. “It seems fragile, but it’s punchy—when she says a word, it somehow goes straight through the speaker and pulls at your heart.”
At the sight of Robyn, the crowd at the Paramount turned collectively into children. The show’s demographic was as familiar to me as my own face. Most of us had been steeping in cynicism for a decade, at least; sincere year-end ideas about celebration and renewal were not really in play. But some people make you feel like all sorts of things might be possible. Robyn’s songs are rarely played on American radio, and she is surrounded by the kind of good will given only to the underdog. Her trajectory is unique: she was a commodity at sixteen, a flop at twenty-one, an indie darling at twenty-six, and a cult icon at thirty-one. Then, unusually, in the second half of her career, she began to reveal herself in new ways.
As the clock ticked toward midnight, she counted us down; against the rococo ceiling, streamers and confetti burst like runoff emotion through the air. This month, Robyn is releasing her ninth album, “Sexistential,” and will soon begin a tour in which she’ll play only arenas. But she booked the Paramount for New Year’s because it has the capacity of the venues that she’s played in for most of her career. She took the stage at one in the morning—she’d wanted her audience to have a late night at the club—and then, a minute into her first song, the sound cut out. The lights came on, the terrible way they do when it’s time to go home. Robyn ran backstage; a fire alarm was ringing, and emergency lights blinked. Ten minutes passed in eyes-wide paralysis—was there a shooter? Had we been foolish to cash in our hidden, hoarded optimism chips on this? A friend turned to me, looking doubtful. “You said she had a baby, right? And she’s, what, mid-forties? Don’t you think she’s, like, ‘Fuck this, I’m going to bed’?”
But all was well: a smoke machine had triggered an alarm in a room high in the venue. Robyn returned and picked up right where she’d left off. “There’s this empty space you left behind / Now you’re not here with me,” she sang. Our anxiety flipped to joy.
“It felt like part of the whole thing, right?” Robyn said to me later, when I asked her about that moment. She’d had too much adrenaline when she’d started that first song anyway, she said—the false alarm gave her a second to drink some wine and laugh a bit. Crowds in New York have a particular intensity, she told me; she’d talked about this recently with her brother, who was travelling with her and had gone out clubbing. It felt related not only to life in the city but to life in the U.S. more broadly. In Stockholm, she said, it’s hard to find a club where people don’t talk on the dance floor. “That’s because our lives are too good,” she explained. “New York is this place where people just work so hard, and you’re in this environment that’s aware that you’re in a country that’s really failing at taking care of its citizens. And that combination, I guess, is really good for people like me, who want to play for an audience that feels something.”
Sweden is a small country—ten and a half million people, roughly the population of North Carolina—that somehow dominates global pop music. It began with ABBA in the nineteen-seventies, followed by Ace of Base in the early nineties, but the real takeover came a few years later, when the songwriter and producer Max Martin started working with everyone from Britney Spears to Céline Dion. Martin has now written more Billboard-charting songs than any artist except Paul McCartney; Martin and another Swede, Shellback, a frequent collaborator, have masterminded hits for most of the major American pop stars of this century. Robyn sang one of Martin’s first hits.
A few months ago, I walked through Södermalm, a hip neighborhood in Stockholm, to a building that looked like a turreted fairy-tale castle on a hill, where I took an old-fashioned cage elevator up to Robyn’s apartment. Two black strollers were parked in the hall. Robyn opened the door wearing a big gray hoodie, jeans with a rip over the ass, and round wire-frame glasses. She gave me a tight hug and hung up my coat in a closet that was as full of practical puffer jackets as Carrie Bradshaw’s walk-in is full of Manolos. Her place was airy and quiet, and light flooded in pleasantly through curved windows that looked out over the water that surrounds the city. Robyn had made strong coffee, and she set out a plate of crisp gingerbread men. The oven in her kitchen was dotted with alphabet magnets; a wooden train set covered the floor of the adjoining room. We sat down at a large kitchen table, and I complimented her on the place, wondering privately whether other international pop stars have primary residences of about seventeen hundred square feet. “A friend of mine lived in this building when I was a kid,” she said. It was the sort of place that her own parents couldn’t have afforded. A few years ago, pondering single motherhood, she bought the apartment and prepared to move in.
Robyn’s parents worked in the theatre. Her father, Wilhelm Carlsson, was a director, and her mother, Maria Ericson, was an actress. Together, they founded an experimental troupe called Teater Schahrazad, and Robin Miriam Carlsson spent much of her early childhood on tour with them around Europe. “It was them and their best friends from high school making the weirdest things,” she told me, as we drank coffee and ate cookies. She recalled a play in which the main character hallucinated in a mental hospital. “All the doctors and nurses became wild animals,” she said. The troupe disbanded when Robyn was seven, and the family settled year-round in Stockholm. Her dad directed shows for the Royal Dramatic Theatre, and her mom did TV and voice-over work, as did Robyn. As a child, she voiced a character in a 1989 animated movie based on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” and the way she speaks now isn’t so different from the ingenuous storybook lilt of that character, an elflike girl in frock and hat.
The family relied on welfare, but Robyn had a sterling arts education, as children generally do in Sweden. Music classes are standard through ninth grade—explanation No. 1 for the Swedes’ stranglehold on pop—and there are almost three hundred government-funded local arts schools in the country. Robyn learned to play the piano, and then, thanks to state-sponsored lessons, the flute. It was clear to everyone, including Robyn herself, that she, too, would become a performer.
Robyn explained her parents’ attitude toward the arts by telling a story about her younger brother, a contemporary dancer who, in his early thirties, decided to change careers. “He was, like, ‘I’m just going to try to work nine to five and have a salary,’ ” she recalled. Her parents staged an intervention, begging him to keep dancing. “I used to think they were so naïve,” Robyn said. “But they really believe in art in a way that is harder for people who are younger. They lived in a way that isn’t really possible in Sweden anymore.” Although Sweden’s social safety net remains generous by American standards, it is not what it once was; the country eliminated a steep wealth tax in 2007, and more recently the government slashed arts funding. Now a Swede can be rich, as Robyn—who seemed to both appreciate and question the fact that she was living far more grandly than her parents did—knows firsthand. “Sometimes I feel like I gentrified their knowledge,” she told me.
Robyn’s parents divorced when she was eleven, and she wrote a song about it—her first—called “In My Heart,” which has a plaintive melody and a simple chorus. “In my heart, I keep it all together,” she sings. “In my heart, I know it’s gonna be better.” Three years later, the Swedish band Legacy of Sound played at Robyn’s school, and there was a slot during an intermission for a student to perform. Robyn sang “In My Heart.” Afterward, the band’s singer, Meja Kullersten, approached her, and soon Robyn was meeting with a talent scout for a subsidiary of the record company BMG, who had her sing “In My Heart” in his office, then signed her on the spot. (“I have been a huge admirer since then,” Kullersten told me. “But, regardless of my interaction, she would have made it anyway.”)
In 1995, “Robyn Is Here,” a sugary R. & B. record, came out in Sweden. “In My Heart” was track two. Robyn co-wrote the album with a lineup of proficient Swedish songwriters, including Max Martin, and it went platinum both at home and in the U.S., where two singles, “Do You Know (What It Takes)” and “Show Me Love,” hit the Top Ten. The album was received, by the press, as strangely impressive: teen pop with flashes of surprising acuity and depth. “Who would believe that it’s a blonde Swede singing such TLC-esque material?” a European critic wrote. At sixteen, Robyn was more commercially successful than she would ever be again—though Robin Carlsson, already a pugnacious, feminist weirdo, only occasionally blinked out from under the angled, icy blond bangs of Robyn the pop star. (She adopted the altered spelling to differentiate herself from the American singer Robin S., who had recently released a hit single also called “Show Me Love.” Later, Robyn reportedly became the reason that Robyn Rihanna Fenty chose to go professionally by her middle name.)
Robyn left Sweden for New York, pursuing pop stardom in an attempt to make a different sort of life from that of her parents. “I wanted to not be poor,” she told me. We had moved from the kitchen to the living room, walking past a tiny table covered in a toddler’s paintings, and were now sitting on curved love seats arranged in a circle. Robyn spoke about her life in the same manner that she writes about love, with forthrightness and a degree of abstraction. Swedes have a reputation for being direct—another national trait sometimes cited as useful for writing pop music, a medium in which one must swiftly get to the point.
In America, Robyn was expected to be sexy, doll-like, and eager to please. “They would say, ‘Let’s show your youthfulness,’ ” she told me, speaking of the various executives and assistants and P.R. people she’d encountered then. This was code, mostly, for her tits. She knew that she wasn’t giving music execs what they wanted—BMG would book six-figure photo shoots for her and then scrap all the pictures. Robyn’s mother was afraid her daughter would lose herself in the American music industry, but Robyn had learned, from her parents, to value integrity and control. Accustomed to sneaking beers in the park with her friends in Stockholm, she decided that she wouldn’t drink in the U.S. She kept her hair short, which registered then—and still does to many—as unfeminine, possibly gay. In the music video for “Show Me Love,” she wore a hoodie and pants. “I just had the instinct to protect my body,” she told me.
The label Jive tried to sign Robyn away from BMG; when that failed, Jive signed a different teen-ager, in the hope that she would be an American version of Robyn, a white girl who could sing radio-friendly R. & B. Her name was Britney Spears. Jive sent Spears to Max Martin, who, as John Seabrook wrote in his 2015 book, “The Song Machine,” found her more pliable than Robyn. When Spears saw Robyn’s music video for “Show Me Love,” a Jive executive recalled, Spears praised the song but said, “If it was me I’d be wearing a miniskirt and I’d be dancing.” Martin subsequently wrote Spears’s début hit, “ . . . Baby One More Time,” and for the video Spears put on the miniskirt and catapulted herself into the cultural stratosphere.
Meanwhile, Robyn was offered an opening spot on a Backstreet Boys tour; she turned it down. She played promotional gigs alongside her ostensible peers, groups such as ’NSync and Destiny’s Child, but “didn’t connect to any of them,” she told me. (The exception was Aaliyah; she and Robyn hung out a few times.) She found some solace at Body & Soul, a weekly house-music night in Tribeca where she partied sober, beginning a lifelong attachment to club music. But within the music industry, she told me, she couldn’t find any “organic structure, where you collaborate and there are values aside from the commercial.”
Mostly, she felt lonely and adrift and insecure. When she performed, she felt worse. “As a performer, you’re like an antenna, receiving things, giving things off,” the Swedish songwriter and producer Klas Åhlund told me. Åhlund would later become Robyn’s closest collaborator; she sometimes describes him as the “second band member in Robyn.” He added, “I think, if there’s any mismatch there or lack of genuine truth, it’s a very painful position to be in.” On tour, in Chicago, Robyn, who had begun having anxiety attacks, freaked out backstage and started throwing things. Her manager had to restrain her. “I hope I made it really hard for those bastards,” Robyn told a Swedish news outlet. It was time to leave America.
For a while, Robyn said, she became “quite obsessed with MTV, seeing all these artists that I’d been in the same world as making it, and it was torture knowing that I could have done that—but also that I couldn’t have done that.” Thirty years after she and Spears first crossed paths, it’s clear that Spears had little real power in the system she seemed to dominate. “She was just surviving in an extremely terrorizing environment,” Robyn told me. (In 2007, Robyn worked with Åhlund on a demo for the song “Piece of Me,” which Spears put out later that year, and which directly addresses her predicament as a commodity.)
Back in Sweden, Robyn tried again, recording the album “My Truth,” which included two songs about an abortion she’d had the previous year. Although she’s hardly flippant on the subject—“Two months of joy before the impossible,” she sings—her label insisted that she remove them for the U.S. release. Robyn refused, and the album never came out in the States. Her third album, “Don’t Stop the Music,” didn’t receive an international release, either. She’d been unable to produce another conventional hit and unable, in what she did make, to sufficiently explain herself. “That album was a disaster,” she told me. “I felt like I had killed something in me with it. I knew that it wasn’t real enough, or good enough, or an honest expression.” She considered going back to school. Maybe, she thought, this was all over now.
Loneliness, Åhlund told me, is built into the Swedish musical tradition. Åhlund is fifty-three and handsome in a friendly way, with deep-blue eyes and a dark beard. He joined me one morning at my hotel in Stockholm, where a Swedish breakfast buffet was laid out—crispbread, smoked fish, slices of meat and cheese. After saying hello, he set down an enormous studio-rat backpack and went to make himself a plate.
When he returned, he told me that, in many places, musical culture centers on performance. Reggae and blues, for instance, are about “rhythm, personality, and delivery,” and are meant “to be experienced communally, with an audience.” Traditional Scandinavian music was a more solitary matter. “You’re singing to yourself as you’re in the forest or herding sheep,” he said. “It’s melody-based, almost like a magic spell where, if you sing these notes, you’ll make this feeling happen. And the feeling is often about longing and melancholy.” I asked him about the stark contrasts in Robyn’s music, the downbeat lyrics and the euphoric sound. “Usually, in a big crowd, we want to celebrate,” he said. “But pain is a very cool thing to experience with strangers as well.”
Åhlund started playing in a hardcore band, Teddybears, in the early nineties. (Max Martin, who was a childhood classmate of his, played in a metal band for years.) About a decade later, he met Robyn for a quick drink before a gig, so that they could feel each other out, see whether they wanted to work together. On leaving the bar, they were accosted by paparazzi, a rare event in Stockholm—Åhlund thought they were being jumped by random attackers. “So we got into a physical altercation, and I was arrested,” he recalled. “I didn’t show up to my gig, because I was in a holding cell. And when I got out the next morning the headline in the paper said ‘Robyn’s Bodyguard in Fight with Photographers.’ ”
Robyn, at this point, was in her twenties. Her dad had pushed her to stay with music, and she’d gone in search of people who were making it for its own sake. She found indie artists her age, including Åhlund and the sibling duo the Knife, who released music on their own label, an arrangement that Robyn found appealing. (It was similar to how her parents had worked with their theatre troupe.) She’d made money in the major-label system, but it didn’t feel like enough to warrant the bullshit. “I had such a bad record deal in the beginning,” she told me. “I think I had a six-per-cent artist royalty on the whole thing.” But six per cent added up in an era when people still bought CDs, and she also had publishing income as a co-writer of all her songs. She got out of her contract, giving up possible future royalties, and took out a loan to start Konichiwa Records, naming the label for a phrase—“Konnichiwa, bitches!”—uttered on Dave Chappelle’s sketch show. Robyn just liked the way it sounded. (The phrase also inspired one of her numerous rap songs; in the music video, Robyn, looking like an art-school Pee-wee Herman, wears a kimono while repeating the phrase. It’s a testament to her earnestness, and possibly to her Swedishness, that no one has ever tried to cancel her for any of this.)
Soon after the evening of the bar fight, Åhlund and Robyn began working together. In one of their first sessions, Robyn found the sound that would carry her through the next twenty years. They had a simple melody; Åhlund was blocking out an arrangement on guitar. It sounded like the Ramones. Robyn suggested he listen to “Cloudbusting,” by Kate Bush—she thought they should try using only strings. Almost immediately, the song took its shape: the lyrics describe watching a beloved fall in love with another woman, but the track sounds like nearly four minutes of swooning. The title, “Be Mine!,” is the stuff of candy hearts.
Over breakfast, Åhlund laughed remembering the session. “Be Mine!” has a spoken-word bridge in which the narrator describes seeing her ex with someone new, and Åhlund and Robyn had tried to torture each other in the studio, imagining the most agonizing possible details. “She had on that scarf I gave you,” Robyn gasps. “And you got down to tie her laces.” There is a deliberate silliness to it, but Robyn delivers the lines with an impassioned sincerity that makes the humor seem unintentional—a pattern that she has repeated throughout her career.
“Be Mine!” was included on Robyn’s first Konichiwa Records album, “Robyn,” in 2005, which was released only in Sweden at first. But music distribution had changed since the nineties; the web was now awash in blogs posting MP3 files for free downloading. I started college that year, and I listened to “Be Mine!” on my iPod every day for months. When “Robyn” finally came out in the States, three years later, it was at an otherwise bleak moment for American pop (“Low,” by Flo Rida, was the top-charting song of 2008), and the album felt intoxicating—provocative emotions and sharp lyrics with immaculate production by genre-agnostic Swedish technicians. “With Every Heartbeat,” a song about romantic hope and despair in equal measure, suspends the listener in a club trance, generating the purgatory of yearning through droning synth and a fiendishly simple structure: it reverses an expected chord pattern, like a tide lapping backward, and never resolves to the chord you’re subconsciously waiting to hear.
“Robyn” became one of the first pop albums to receive a review from the indie bible Pitchfork, which called it “one of the year’s finest, smartest, and most engaging pop records.” (“Trust the Swedes,” the reviewer added. “They know what they’re doing with this sort of thing.”) Its critical acceptance was a harbinger of the musical and critical landscape to come, in which esoterically minded artists would take big mainstream swings and pop albums would be seen as art worthy of serious consideration.
It mattered, the radio host and d.j. Zane Lowe told me, that Robyn had previously made more plainly commercial work. “It almost had to be someone who’d been the next big conventional pop star to come out there and say, ‘Why can’t pop music be tasteful in a different way? Why can’t it be for the dance floor? Why can’t it be way more honest and thematically visceral?’ ” When Robyn did that, he said, she helped “make it possible for other artists to show up and be themselves.” Something of Robyn’s vulnerability and fervency is audible in Lorde, who performed on “Saturday Night Live,” in 2017, with a framed photo of Robyn on the piano—and who has written that when she heard “Dancing on My Own” she knew that she would be “in love with music” for the rest of her life. Charli XCX, whose insolent and Zeitgeist-defining 2024 album, “Brat,” featured Robyn on its first remix track, has cited her as “an example of someone doing things completely on her own terms.”
After “Robyn” came the “Body Talk” trilogy, the result of a furious period of productivity with Åhlund, who produced and co-wrote most of the tracks. Åhlund has worked with a lot of big acts (Katy Perry, the Weeknd, Usher, Madonna), but his relationship with Robyn is like a marriage: they can fight, make each other uncomfortable, struggle together. “We have the luxury of exploring things that are a little bit beyond our reach, because we’ll just do it until it’s right,” he told me. Robyn said that Åhlund is the reason so much of her music is conscious of the romantic other—the beloved kissing another girl across the dance floor, the girlfriend about to get dumped. “My music is a negotiation between a man and woman,” Robyn said. “It really is us, together, evaluating love.”
When I saw Robyn on the “Body Talk” tour, in 2011, she had adopted a sort of action-figure presentation, kicking and punching her way around the stage in a stretchy unitard and combat boots. The poignancy of it, again, came from contrast: she wasn’t actually bionic; she was soft, and she was trying, within each song, to transcend her own limitations, so that her listeners could transcend theirs. “It’s a collectivist—sorry, eye roll, but it is—thing,” the comedian Bowen Yang, a longtime fan who interviewed Robyn for his podcast shortly after the Paramount show, told me. “Most other pop stars arrange the live experience in a particular way. You come here to worship me. There’s something about Robyn where you know it’s not like that.” Despite the technical flawlessness of her music, Yang noted, there is a “serrated edge to it”—a jaggedness that gives the listener a foothold, a hurt that makes it profound.
“It’s exciting to revisit, over and over, something so primal in this short-attention-span, chewing-gum aesthetic,” Åhlund told me, speaking of heartbreak as we ate our whole-grain breads piled with sweet butter. “It gets heightened into something like a reverse ecstasy.” Perhaps the deep and abiding attachment that Robyn’s fans feel to her and her music has to do with the way that this feeling—reverse ecstasy—is increasingly, for many of them, the basic sensation of being alive.
Shortly after Robyn finished touring “Body Talk,” she went to a clinic in Los Angeles and froze her eggs. She was in her mid-thirties and had been dating the videographer Max Vitali, who directed a few of her music videos. “I always thought about myself, I will be a mother,” she told me. “I think pouring love into another human being that really needs it is one of the most satisfying things. But I had long relationships throughout my whole life, and none of them produced an environment where I felt like it would happen.” Before Vitali, she had been engaged to Olof Inger, a former M.M.A. fighter who became a visual artist. “I’ve always fallen in love with people who are rebellious and are not looking to be accepted by society,” she told me. “I find that attractive.” But it’s complicated, she said, to date someone who feels most comfortable as an outsider. In her romantic life, she often sought drama—the highs that would come before or after or even within the lows. “The drama is so deceiving,” she said. “You confuse it with love.”
In Stockholm, Robyn has a ground-floor office with a couple of desks, a mirrored rehearsal room with a turntable set up for live streaming, and a sitting area across from a floor-to-ceiling shoe shelf stacked with outlandish stage-wear platforms. I visited her there on my second day in the city. She had on black jeans and a huge yellow puffer. She urged a fluffy blanket on me, then sniffed. “Is something burning?” A lamp near us, she discovered, was giving off some faint, evil smoke. She grabbed it, and the bulb shattered spontaneously. She then opened the windows, fanned the smoke with a blanket, picked up the rug beneath the lamp, shook off the glass—quick and workmanlike, the motions of a woman used to solving problems herself.
During the “Body Talk” era, Robyn started intensive psychoanalysis, doing multiple sessions per week. “If you’re famous early on, you’re protecting yourself from the scrutiny of people that you don’t know,” she told me. “So you guard yourself, and you are not sharing yourself, and as a result you’re not being mirrored as yourself.” In analysis, she realized that the distanced longing she expressed in so much of her music was rooted—“of course”—in her relationship to her father. “He was very shy,” she said, “and hard to get close to, and I realized I had kept accepting that in other situations.” (“Dancing on My Own” is, on one level, really about her dad.) He joined her in therapy, and it became Robyn’s project to dismantle this pattern in her life: “I didn’t have to relate to other people that I loved that way.”
A year after Robyn froze her eggs, she and Vitali broke up. Then a close friend and collaborator, the producer Christian Falk, received a diagnosis of terminal cancer; he died that July. Robyn entered a period of profound depression, from which she emerged only slowly. She went clubbing a lot, the way she had as a lonely teen-ager in America, and eventually found solace in the format of club music, in which there is often no clear structure, no obvious revelation or payoff. As with psychoanalysis, the reward would come through patience, through surfing every affective wave.
She began writing a new album, “Honey.” That substance—sweet, mystical, a little disgusting—had become a totem for ideas about slowness and transcendence and sexuality which were emerging in her music. The album had a new open-endedness and sensuality; on the cover, she’s bent over, wearing a red bra, in a pose that suggests something X-rated might be happening out of frame. Robyn had never been so frankly sexual before. “It wasn’t until ‘Honey’ that it was an intention of mine,” she told me. “It kind of makes me sad that it took so long, but I understand. It takes a long time to not judge your expression of sexuality and sex as too much.”
She and Vitali got back together while she was recording, and she wrote a song for the album called “Ever Again,” which promises that things will be different now. “Daddy issues and silly games / That shit got so lame,” she sings. “Never gonna be brokenhearted / Ever again.” Just before she went on tour, they broke up a second time. Singing “Ever Again” in front of thousands of people felt humiliating, she told me—she had become an avatar for a cycle of hope and bliss and heartbreak that, on the cusp of forty, she couldn’t stop repeating. “It became hilariously embarrassing to me,” she said. “I was just, like, ‘I’m so tired of this person that I am.’ ” But Robyn just needed to appreciate herself in the same way that her audience did. “The person who wrote ‘Dancing on My Own’ is a really lonely person who used that loneliness to get herself out of her sadness,” she told me. “I started to love that I was able to do that—to respect it again, to not see it as a weakness but as a way of surviving.”
It was 4 P.M., and pitch-black—but the windows in her office, on account of the little lamp fire, were open to the winter air. “The illusion you kind of have to kill is that it’s going to work out,” she said, talking about her breakups. “Because eventually you’re going to die, right?”
In March, 2020, Robyn got on a flight from the U.S. to Stockholm, with plans to start working on a new album and to begin I.V.F. Soon after she reached Sweden, however, it became clear that, thanks to COVID, she wouldn’t be returning to the clinic in Los Angeles anytime soon. She would have to start from scratch. “It made me quite scared,” she said, describing the long, painful dance with fear and uncertainty that comes with I.V.F. “And it also made me quite unstoppable.” The black box of the human body was broken open and diagrammed in front of her; she was fascinated by the machinery. Her song “Fembot,” from “Body Talk,” was partly prompted by thoughts about technological reproduction: “My system’s in mint condition / The power’s up on my transistors / Working fine, no glitches / Plug me in and flip some switches,” she sings. When she got pregnant, at forty-two, she felt a little bit bionic, at last—a fembot for real.
She also became “so horny,” she said. She got on the dating app Raya and started seeing people, but initially she kept the pregnancy to herself. (On Raya, users pick a song for their profile; Robyn’s was “Practice,” by the Trinidadian soca artist GBM Nutron, which later became her son’s favorite song.) “It was very liberating for me to have baby-making separated from lovemaking,” she told me. She fell in love with one of the men she met but kept things casual. “It helped me,” she said. “It sounds, maybe, like I used the people I was seeing, but I think I really needed to be appreciated and loved.”
Robyn gave birth to her son, Tyko, in 2022. “Once he was there, it was very obvious to me that I was going to be able to do it,” she said. “And there are many, many bad things about being a single parent, but there are also good things. You don’t have anyone to get annoyed with, so you can free that space.” She called the postpartum experience “a very serious time,” adding, “It’s a mental desert when you’re alone with a kid—you hear the wind, the tumbleweeds blowing.” She submitted to it. Then, when Tyko was a year and seven months, she put him in day care and went back to work.
“Sexistential,” the new album, came together in fits and starts. Robyn and Åhlund began it early in the pandemic, but Åhlund, at that point, was home with a new baby. “You’re trying to build this sonic vessel that’s going to carry a drunk person after midnight in a crowded, sweaty room—you’ve got to find that place within you,” he told me. “But it’s just not really where you are when you’re on paternity leave.” Then Robyn took her own hiatus.
They had pulled a couple of tracks out of the archives early on, including “Dopamine,” a song they’d been toying with for a decade. Over breakfast, Åhlund played me an old version. It was sparer than what appears on the album; Robyn’s harmonized voice provided a throbbing backdrop, and the verses began slowly. It was good, but something was missing. The final recording conveys the urgency of something being created in real time: the synths swarm around the vocal line like a corroborating aura; the pulse in the back is a deep heartbeat; the verses begin in a flurry, a storm of euphoria in the dark. “I know it’s just dopamine,” Robyn sings, a melancholy thought delivered over a hopeful major chord. The chord switches to a minor, and the words conjure an ephemeral hope: “But it feels so real to me.” (Robyn and Åhlund, leaning into her music’s familiar duality, started saying that they wanted the music to sound “like the producer hadn’t heard the lyrics.”) Those two lines, when I first heard them, sent me back to uncountable nights out, when I’d felt exalted and been mistaken. I began to cry.
Robyn also resuscitated the song “Blow My Mind,” from her forgotten third album, and rewrote some of the lyrics to be about breast-feeding: “Baby, ravish me / Tear into my flesh / Button down my shirt / Go on, make a mess.” (It is perhaps the first song about lactation that legions of gay men will do poppers to.) She wrote “Talk to Me,” a song about being close to orgasm and needing your lover to verbally get you there, with Max Martin—their first collaboration since “Body Talk.” “I think the thing that I keep coming back to,” she told me at one point, describing her artistic process, “is just this insane pleasure. It’s almost as important as masturbation. It’s the same kind of thing, finding my own way of pleasuring myself with rhythm and melody.” (Did she mean to imply, I asked her later, that masturbation was more important than music? Yes, she said.) “That’s kind of what I hear when I listen to Bruce or when I listen to Mk.gee—the rhythm of the words, how they pressure the melody, the friction between those two things.” (Springsteen is a touchstone for her; Mk.gee, another New Jersey songwriter, is one of her favorite new artists.) Robyn’s Scandinavian frankness allows her to acknowledge often unspoken sexual convergences—the violent sensuality embedded in motherhood, the strange eros in death. One of my favorite Robyn songs, a 2014 collaboration with Röyksopp called “Monument,” describes both gravedigging and penetration—“Make a space / For my body / Dig a hole / Push the sides apart”—and links both subjects to the ego dissolution one sometimes finds in a club. Music “does something to my body that nothing else but sex does,” she said.
Robyn worried that the title “Sexistential” was a bit cringe—“a little ‘horny mom,’ ” as she put it—but she grew to like it. The title track, in which Robyn raps, deadpan, about being sex-crazy while getting herself pregnant, was the last one that she and Åhlund finished, only a couple of months before the album was finalized. “A lot of that is because I had to convince Klas to help me write, basically, this rap about I.V.F.,” she said. “He didn’t think it was a good idea, which I think is just bad taste of him.” In the song, she rhymes “donor” with “boner,” refers to being “in my sweatpants and some juicy hentai,” and alludes to having raw sex in her first trimester: “Fuck a Plan B, baby, it’s no big deal / I’m already ten weeks in maternity.”
The sexual renaissance of middle-aged mothers is an increasingly popular subject in novels and films (“All Fours,” “The Lost Daughter,” “Babygirl”), but it has yet to be addressed much in pop music—and it’s not yet entirely welcomed in real life. In January, Robyn appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and performed “Sexistential,” rapping and writhing on the floor. Her solo performance style, which melds the dramatic sincerity of an ice dancer with the unhinged artlessness of a person alone in her house, can be oddly transcendent, as in the video for “Call Your Girlfriend,” from 2011, which is one long shot of Robyn dancing by herself in a warehouse, and which went viral. On “Colbert,” though, this style didn’t exactly land; a clip of the performance also went viral, for different reasons. The Post later compiled various mocking comments made online, including “I have secondhand embarrassment” and “This is not what a fifty year old woman should be doing.” When I asked Robyn about this, she was well aware of the reaction. “Americans are so prude,” she said. “I think it’s great that people don’t get it. I don’t care. The funniest comments were the ones like ‘This can’t be serious.’ ”
Robyn is always sincere, even when she’s rapping about ejaculate, but she is not always being serious. She finds many things funny, she told me, including trying to create life inside her while also trying to get laid. It is still funny to her, in a way, that she won’t ever know the father of her own child.
She has always made music for people who are chasing experience as an end in itself. Love, for her, is not the pathway to a tidy adulthood; heartbreak is not the dark before the dawn; the club is not a place to meet someone. When she came out for an encore at the Paramount, at two-thirty in the morning, she performed “Indestructible,” from “Body Talk.” Its chorus is a promise you make both to lovers and to children: “I’m gonna love you like I’ve never been hurt before / I’m gonna love you like I’m indestructible.” She then sang “Show Me Love” live for the first time in thirteen years, stripping it down to a simple ballad, and it was clear that this song she wrote as a child presaged the dominant theme of her career: love is the only devastation we choose freely, and she is greedy for it, because that’s what it means to be alive.
Very few people manage to carry this message into the darker wilds of adulthood—and it’s what everyone at the Paramount wanted to hear. When the run-on synth drill that begins “Dancing on My Own” arrived next, the room seemed to fill with lightning. During the first chorus, the sound cut out and the crowd sang the words. But the sound stayed cut; Robyn flung kisses into the audience. Everyone around me gasped—was she going to leave us like this? Again? Then the music kicked back in. It wasn’t over yet. ♦