November 2025. We were busy compiling our final iterations of the end of year albums and tracks, luxuriating in the eleven months of fantastic releases and looking forward to what 2026 would bring, and a new single dropped from the sky. Right into the middle of everything.
“I know it’s just dopamine [DOH-DOH-DOH-DOH] / But if feels to real to me [DOH-DOH-DOH-DOH]”.
That voice was so familiar. The lush synths. The euphoria. With her first solo single since 2019, and Robyn was BACK.
Robyn’s been part of my pop culture landscape since way back in 1997 (a ridiculously long time ago, for a pop artist… I was one year out of university!) when she appeared on the Backstreet Boys/Britney-adjacent Show Me Love, an early Max Martin piece that didn’t exactly point to either of their futures directly, but certainly stuck in my head. In terms of semi-informed potted histories, she’d been recording in her home country of Sweden since she was 12, and by the time I next encountered her, in the still banging ‘With Every Heartbeat‘ – a single from her fourth (!) album – she’d already been somewhat chewed up by the pop machine. Having moved from giant BMG to Jive, then exited that deal to find artistic freedom, and formed her own label, the aptly-named Konichiwa Records. This is where she’d release the self-titled album from which her first UK No.1 single would appear, as ‘With Every Hearbeat’, the track she made with Kleerup tacked onto the reissued UK version. At 28, she’d already lived whole careers in that decade since Show Me Love, but found her feet.
After that, she didn’t look back. There has never the superstardom had by others around her before and since – think Britney, Christina, or Adele, Gaga, Katy, Lorde, and now Taylor, or Charli – but she certainly has her own niche to exist in: synth-driven pop music powered by loss and heartbreak. Sound a bit vague? Perhaps it’s Dancing On My Own that defined her more than anything, and stamped the genre she made her own: The Sad Banger.
I’m in the corner
Watchin’ you kiss her, oh
I’m right over here
Why can’t you see me? Oh
I’m giving it my all
But I’m not the girl you’re takin’ home, ooh
I keep dancing on my own
I keep dancing on my own
Sure, we’ve all heard lyrics like this, but they were over a ballad, or piano, or various flavours of pop melodies. But this… this was over pumping dancefloor percussion and synths. This was a backing track you’d usually hear without vocals or as the celebratory ‘I’ve won her/his heart’ lyrics. Robyn flipped the script, and leaned into the desolation, but you couldn’t help dance to it. As Robyn said herself, the song “represents the precise moment on the dancefloor when you have to get your desperation, frustration and sadness out”. And I’ve been dancing to it ever since.
It’s oversimplifying Robyn’s long and interesting career, full of reinvention and making music how she wants to, an open book often baring the private, uncomfortable, moving away from the cliche (her previous album, Honey revolved around the loss of her friend and sometime collaborator, Christian Falk). This corner of dancefloor pop music is something she’s created, working with a trusted set of producers and engineers who understand her world, and something that’s been redone by others ever since. And that is the mark of something truly creative. I may not be a Robyn stan (that’s my friend Marco, who still plays that track in DJ sets, and queued up to meet her recently in Manchester), but I’ve loved so much of what she’s done, without ever quite dropping into fanboy territory. Until now.
I adored Dopamine. While I’ve really loved Robyn’s music over the years, this seemed to hit hard. I’ve always liked music that leans into the spirit of the dancefloor unashamedly, given I’ve spent so much of my adult life on and around them, and this transplanted itself into so much of what I felt when I think back to the best times I’ve spent on them, in London, or Manchester, Ibiza, Leeds, or Croatia. Not just her vocals, but the effects that turn them into this warm chorus that wraps the track in this fuzzy haze. The lyrics, which smartly layer the real euphoria of joy, of being in the moment, with a nod to the modern affliction of that online hit, that reply, the like, and how we are so accustomed to micro-highs that tie us to the online world. All wrapped up in three and a half minutes of pumping action. Just as All My Friends does, or Layo and Bushwacka’s Love Story, or The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me Baby? the moment this cranks up, I know exactly where my head is at. Feed it into my veins!
I heard an album was coming soon, and before Sexistential dropped in late March, we got 3 more tasters in what would turn out to be nearly half the album. Talk To Me’s single entendres (“I’m coming fast so guide me in”) over a Max Martin-amped chorus, shedding any societal preconceptions over what a 46-year-old woman should or should not talk about. The title track – and probably one of the album’s marmit-est moments, riffs on her single-mum IVF journey in lockdown, simultaneously horny, lonely, exasperated and laughing at her own situation. Because who else would do a rap about ovaries over a nervous, sparse percussion track and warping bass?
What Sexistential gives us is a fantastically conceived, pocket rocket of a modern pop album – twenty nine minutes and not a single second wasted – that can loop through over and over again before you know it, pulling you in all sorts of emotional directions. It’s the backdrop for the ‘what has she been up to?’ story from a fierce and yet open and searingly honest pop star who has sailed into her 40s and decided the best thing to do is play to her strengths, 8 years on from her last record. What you get on this ninth studio album are some right-up-there-with-the-best moments of pop – It Don’t Mean A Thing’s straight-up wistful remembering of the potential of a relationship no more, to the hopefulness of Light Up, and the closing (and best track on the album, to me) Into The Sun, with Robyn refusing to give up on love, being willing to burn up, just to give it a shot. As much as there’s humour, disclosure and sex on here, the album is as much about the reward of love – lost and yet to be found – as much as anything. And that feeling is something we all need in a fractured, chaotic world.
Music, is, after all, about connection. And for whatever reason that Robyn’s previous albums never quite hit my soul, this one has. Musically, it throbs. But more than that, I listen to each song – even Sexistential – and find something there that talks to me. That gets me right in the solar plexus. I’m 5 years older than Robyn, and a parent, so there’s a definite emotional tug within the songs too (Exihibit C: the cleverly remade Blow My Mind, which swaps the original’s love song for new motherhood), and that is a feeling you can’t control, can’t map or can’t force. It’s either there or it isn’t.
There will be bigger albums. Taylor’s 20 special edition formats chewing up vinyl plants, or Olivia Rodrigo’s upcoming album. Or perhaps one we don’t even know is coming, like Brat’s follow-up. But as they each do their thing, this album has Robyn’s vibrancy running through it like a name in a stick of rock. And it’ll be in my top 10 in November, just in time to hear the first single of one of 2027’s favourites.
What will everyone else think? I have no idea.
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