It’s the first Monday of the New Year, and Robyn is sprawled out on a mattress in St. Andrew the Apostle, a modest Roman Catholic church in Brooklyn. She’s wearing a skintight leopard-print outfit — perfect for a horny 46-year-old iconoclast who enjoys a godlike status in contemporary pop. It’s a rare sight: Robyn operates on her own schedule, disappearing from the public eye until she’s ready. Seven years have gone by since her last album, Honey, which was widely considered one of the best of 2018. Now she’s returned, in the middle of a loneliness crisis and mass division, to remind us of the hard-won pleasures of human connection.
In two days, Robyn will announce her ninth album, Sexistential, set for release March 27. The lead-up has been cryptic. She teased its first snippets — remixed extended versions of tracks “Really Real” and “Sexistential” — to lucky attendees at Acne Studios’ Paris Fashion Week spring-summer show in October, before officially releasing the endorphin rush of a new single “Dopamine.” Then a week later, she appeared in Los Angeles for a one-night-only show at the Fonda Theatre. (Anya Taylor-Joy, Kyle MacLachlan, and Miranda July were among the many fans who congregated.) Crossing coasts, she rang in the New Year with a CNN performance in Times Square and two “Robyn and Friends” nights at Brooklyn Paramount, where she played “Dopamine,” “Talk to Me,” and “Sexistential” and treated those of us who snagged tickets to a performance of “Show Me Love,” a breakout single from her debut album.
In her youth, Robin Miriam Carlsson was kind of a proto-Britney, propelling Max Martin’s career as a pop kingmaker. She grew up in Stockholm, touring with her parents’ independent theater troupe, and got a record deal at the age of 14. A decade later, unhappy with the artistic compromises imposed by the label, she went independent with her own Konichiwa Records.
Since then, Robyn has straddled the mainstream pop industry and the warehouse underground, distilling personal wisdom and an alternative sensibility into karaoke classics. She possesses the unique ability to expose the rawest parts of her psyche while revealing little of her own biography; her electropop anthems “Call Your Girlfriend,” “Hang With Me,” and especially “Dancing on My Own” feel universal, not ready-made. Uninterested in traditional benchmarks of success, she releases music on her own timeline and has only grown more powerful in her absence. After a demo version of her song “Honey” appeared in the final season of Girls, fans started the online campaign #ReleaseHoneyDammit; the next year, she finally did.
Over the years, Robyn has shape-shifted from a bratty dancehall queen to a slutty cyborg and a heartbroken lover trying to start anew. What unites her music is a kind of earnest wonder at our capacity for change. On Honey, she grieved the loss of her longtime collaborator, Christian Falk, and the dissolution of her relationship with videographer Max Vitali. And yet, no matter how profound the pain, she always finds the courage to open her heart again. “Won’t you get me right where the hurt is?” she sings on the album’s title track. To love, fail, and try once more — this is what it means to be alive.
In 2022, she quietly gave birth to her first child, now 3. She’s solo parenting (with family support) and singing about the experience on Sexistential. With this album, she challenges the idea that life stalls at middle age. “I feel like the purpose of my life is to stay horny,” Robyn says in the album’s press release, a prelude to gonzo tracks about one-night stands while ten weeks pregnant, overspending on Etsy, and fantasizing about Adam Driver. To Robyn, horniness isn’t just about the physical act of sex but finding the eros in everyday life — “feeling sensual and attracted to things that I enjoy and not letting anything take over that.” In both sound and message, Sexistential courts the unexpected. Club beats switch up without warning; errant sound effects — an electric-guitar roar, a baby’s coo, machine sputters — disturb what could have been conventional electropop songs.
Robyn’s emotional candor and steadfast commitment to her own process, however long it takes, have made her revered by her fellow musicians and artists. “You inspire every single artist doing pop music right now,” Taylor Swift told her from the stage of the 2020 NME Awards while accepting Best Solo Act in the World. (Robyn was crowned Songwriter of the Decade at the ceremony.) She created the blueprint for self-directed pop stars Charli XCX, Lorde, and Carly Rae Jepsen. To welcome her back to the spotlight, we invited musicians, actors, and other tastemakers to ask Robyn for her takes on everything from motherhood to raving in old age.
Talk to Me
Eighteen questions for Sweden’s reigning queen of pop from her biggest (celebrity) fans.
Carly Rae Jepsen: Your single “Dopamine” is amazing, and I heard it took ten years to come into the world. When you’ve written a song over time like that, I’m curious if you’re pulling from different experiences and different relationships or if the song is all about one person.
Robyn: “Dopamine” is very much about me, not even a particular relationship. It’s about being on apps and exposing yourself to just the vulnerability of being on a date with someone you’re really into or all the fantasies you have about someone in the beginning of a relationship. There is both expectation and fear about what’s gonna happen, and what it does to you physically, and how beautiful it is to even get to experience that. I think earlier in my life, it felt overbearing and dangerous. You never know how many times you’ll fall in love. And when it happens, it’s an alien experience. The beauty of that needs to be celebrated.
Tess Holliday: What song makes you feel the most free when you perform it?
Robyn: It changes every time. The last show I did, it was “Monument,” a remix version by Olof Dreijer, but that’s just because I haven’t played it that much. Sometimes it’s the old ones; sometimes it’s “Dancing on My Own” because that song holds me and the audience. We do it together. But the challenge is to find that place of freedom in all the songs when you’re performing them live.
Esther Perel: What makes live shows so special for you? What do you see as the difference between collective listening and listening to music alone at home or anywhere else?
Robyn: Being onstage is one of the most important routines of my life. Even though you repeat it, you have to risk yourself in order for the audience to feel connected to what’s happening. It’s a ceremony. It’s the total loss of control and also the possibility to create this fire-starter energy that I truly enjoy.
Releasing a song like “Dancing on My Own,” for example, I don’t really feel like it’s my song anymore. I feel like it’s my fans’ song. Onstage, you transmit without expecting anything in return, but it is what you get in return that creates the kind of feedback loop that a good show needs to have. I think listening to music on my own is beautiful, but what I like to do with other people is actually sing with other people. Singing together with other people is one of the most healing things human beings can do.
Charli XCX: What’s the best party you’ve ever been to?
Robyn: The best party that I’ve ever been to, except for your wedding, is a little hard to say, but the most lavish was a Christmas party at Agent Provocateur founders Joseph Corré and Serena Rees’s townhouse in London. If I were to choose a party with music, DJ Harvey at Pikes — a hotel in Ibiza — in the summer of 2015. Pikes allows you to be both very intimate and very wild at the same time. And Harvey in that little room is something everyone should experience.
Elsa Hosk: Does privacy feel like protection to you or creative freedom?
Robyn: That’s a really good question. I think privacy is maybe something I take a little bit for granted because I live in Sweden. It’s a very private place in a way, but I don’t feel like my creative freedom has anything to do with privacy because I expose my life all the time in my songs. But privacy keeps me happy, sane, and mysterious.
Tinashe: When writing music, do you tend to be inspired more by pleasure or pain?
Robyn: I’m never inspired by pain. I think pain is so overrated, but I do think that finding my way out of pain into pleasure is very inspiring. So I respect pain, but I don’t look for it.
Troye Sivan: If you were not doing music at all, what would your job be? What do you think you would want to do?
Robyn: I would be a preschool teacher at a Waldorf school because being around little children is extremely inspiring. I realized this when my son was in preschool and I was hanging out there a lot.
Troye Sivan: What is something that you think Sweden gets really right that the rest of the world can learn from?
Robyn: Sweden has this unwritten law called Jantelagen, which gets a lot of shit. In America, you would call it “being a hater”? I think we need haters. We need to look at being sensible as a good thing. I think the Swedish way of describing this is a way of holding back or not putting yourself above anyone else. Right now, when the environment goes crazy, the world is going crazy, we should think more about community. What is the long-term effect of my actions? How am I affecting other people? Maybe it’s better to hold back a little bit and not assume we’re going to be here forever.
Paul W. Downs: Do you find time to watch TV, and if so, what are you watching?
Robyn: I rewatched Girls. It’s strangely awkward and extremely real and funny, and I still love it.
Tinashe: What is one seemingly mundane or ridiculous thing that makes you super-happy? Like a favorite smell, favorite food, or a guilty pleasure?
Robyn: Nothing makes me happier than waking up to new snow in Stockholm. The city gets quiet and bright, and people have a harder time doing things, which makes everybody slow down. You can go skiing here, and it just gets really beautiful.
Carly Rae Jepsen: You are a mother and an artist, a woman who does it all. I’m expecting soon, so I’m curious to know what becoming a mother did to change your relationship to the tour cycle, how you release music, all those good things. I could use all the advice.
Robyn: I could go on about this for an hour, but I think that what changed is that whenever I go to the studio now, I feel like I’m on vacation. I truly enjoy my own time because I don’t have that much of it. But I grew up on tour with my parents, so I think touring with kids is definitely possible — although I will be doing it a little bit differently than my parents did because we were in a Volkswagen bus and I didn’t wear any seat belts.
Adam Lambert: Who was “Dancing on My Own” written about?
Robyn: Well, it was my ex-boyfriend, and I was very in love with him for many, many years, but we were both in other relationships. Actually, there were many men who inspired that song on different occasions during a crazy period of my life.
Charli XCX: Tell me about a person you’ve met who’s changed your life.
Robyn: Christian Falk is the person who changed me the most when it comes to music. He made me so much sharper and more intuitive. It was such a beautiful thing to have a friend 20 years older than me who introduced me to new music on a regular basis, more so than friends my age. He’s the person who introduced me to U.K. garage when he was, like, 55 or something. And Suicide and lots of other things that I hadn’t heard at the time. So Christian, RIP.
Anya Taylor-Joy: What’s your favorite birthday memory?
Robyn: My favorite birthday memory is probably the first time I celebrated my birthday as a mother with my son. Best feeling in the world.
Jerry Saltz: What scares you about writing, and what do you do about it? How do you approach a problem when it presents itself? I know that I’m terrified of everything I do.
Robyn: I just assume that fear is a part of the process. If you’re not allowing yourself to be afraid, then there’s a big chance you’ll miss things. And if I’m not scared, if I’m not uncomfortable or I don’t feel like I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, then I’m probably not doing it well enough.
But I’m obviously afraid of being pretentious. The first draft of a lyric for a song is so embarrassing, and it makes me want to kill myself when I read back my notes. That’s just the way it goes. You have to be really embarrassing for a while and then find people you’re okay with being embarrassing with. Sooner or later you’ll get to something less embarrassing.
The Dare: Do you ever find it unpleasant to hear your music in public?
Robyn: Whenever I’m being watched by someone who knows who I am and puts on my music to flirt with me or make me happy, it makes me feel really uncomfortable. So don’t ever do that to me.
Jade: What is your favorite Swedish delicacy?
Robyn: I think it’s knäckebröd with really good Bregott, which is just hard bread with butter. I don’t know if it’s a delicacy, but I like it.
Kelly Lee Owens: Björk famously said that she will be raving until she’s 90. Do you feel that you’ll be doing the same?
Robyn: Yes.
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