{"id":559691,"date":"2026-03-23T20:32:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T20:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/559691\/"},"modified":"2026-03-23T20:32:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T20:32:07","slug":"robyns-sexistential-is-a-grown-up-dance-pop-winner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/559691\/","title":{"rendered":"Robyn’s ‘Sexistential’ is a Grown-Up Dance-Pop Winner"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tRobyn<\/a> has already lived so many lives. The Swedish teen-pop ingenue who blew up worldwide in the 1990s. The rebel dance-floor auteur who went her own way in the 2000s. The mysterious cult hero. The queer icon. The pop queen. The disco poet who did for stilettos and broken bottles what Stevie Nicks did for landslides.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut these days, Robyn\u2019s more excited about the lives she still has in front of her. She\u2019s back with her first album in eight years, Sexistential<\/a> (out on Friday), and as you can guess from the excellent title, she\u2019s not exactly playing coy. She\u2019s got sex on the brain \u2014 the adult kind, with her midlife hormones raging away. As she boasts, \u201cMy body\u2019s a spaceship, with the ovaries on hyperdrive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRobyn\u2019s got a timeless mystique unlike anyone else in music \u2014 always the grown-up in the room, inspiring a rare kind of awe in a genre where novelty usually reigns. Part of her allure is the confident way she bides her time between albums \u2014 Sexistential is her first since 2018\u2019s Honey, which was her first since her classic Body Talk trilogy in 2010, the album that gave the world \u201cDancing on My Own.\u201d She\u2019s willing to wait until she\u2019s got a personal statement to make.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSexistential is aimed right at the dance floor, in the mode of her fantastic November single \u201cDopamine.\u201d She\u2019s got a gloriously unapologetic adult perspective \u2014 this woman left her GAFs behind in the last century. She\u2019s reporting from life in her forties, with blunt tales of middle-aged lust, single motherhood, and hitting the club as an independent grown-up.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tThe title banger is quite the manifesto, as Robyn raps about dressing up to go hit the town and hook up with random lovers, while she happens to be pregnant via IVF. When the doctor at the fertility clinic asks about her ideal sperm donor, she admits, \u201cAdam Driver always did kind of give me a boner.\u201d (The doctor gets him mixed up with Adam Sandler.) She wrote the song after Andr\u00e9 3000 said he turned to playing the jazz flute because he felt nobody wanted to hear him rap about getting a colonoscopy. But that\u2019s exactly the kind of adult realness she goes for on this album. As she pleads, \u201cFuck a app, I need me some IRL.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tShe co-produced Sexistential with longtime collaborator Klas \u00c5hlund and reteamed with old friend Max Martin \u2014 these two basically grew up together, since he produced her 1990s Swedish pop hits. They co-wrote two of the album\u2019s highlights, the phone-sex come-on \u201cTalk to Me\u201d and the sensitive \u201cInto the Sun.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHoney was her introspective comedown, an album of late-night melancholy where she broods over love pains. This time she\u2019s more playful, after the end of a long-term relationship. Not since Leonard Cohen has anyone made such poetry out of the midlife libido on the prowl, running for the money and the flesh.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cReally Real\u201d sets the tone, opening the album with a bittersweet synth-pop picture of two lovers splitting apart. Robyn zeroes in on the precise moment when she falls out of love \u2014 in bed, where she\u2019s \u201ctied up under your duvet\/You\u2019re midperformance, I\u2019m planning my escape.\u201d It\u2019s a fitting start to the kind of album where sexual fireworks and philosophical crises can erupt side by side.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn one of the most poignant moments, she revisits her 2002 single \u201cBlow My Mind,\u201d revamping it into a vaporwave love song to her son. Back when she first did \u201cBlow My Mind,\u201d it was all electro-clash swagger and loud guitar, as she moves in on her new conquest. But now she\u2019s gushing to her three-year-old, \u201cJust let me crush your scrumptious little face.\u201d She swerves all over emotional extremes in these songs, driven by different kinds of desire.All over Sexistential, she takes stock of the emotional wreckage in her past. But she sounds exhilarated by the hard-won freedom of learning to leave it behind. She\u2019s got so much affection for all of the young Robyns she used to be. But the thrill is her commitment to right now, and the new Robyns she\u2019s got in her future. And on Sexistential, she sounds ready to let them all go hit the dance floor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robyn has already lived so many lives. The Swedish teen-pop ingenue who blew up worldwide in the 1990s.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":559692,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136,84565,276141],"class_list":{"0":"post-559691","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-robyn","13":"tag-sexistential"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/559692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}