Is the world ready for midlife female pop star realness? The early reaction to the Swedish pop queen Robyn’s new album, Sexistential, suggests they might not be. When she performed the title track on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert this year, a lot of the commentary online could be summed up in one word: cringe.
A 46-year-old woman writhing on the floor in red leather trousers rapping about having hook-up sex while pregnant through IVF was too much for some people. Those sensitive souls had better avoid the album, which also includes a deliciously sexy ode to phone sex (Talk to Me) and a celebration of the physical bliss of breastfeeding (Blow My Mind).
For listeners made of sterner stuff, though, Sexistential is pure joy. It’s Robyn’s first album since the woozy, downbeat Honey in 2018 and its lyrics reflect the way her life has been transformed in the interim. Shortly after Honey was released Robyn broke up with her long-term partner and embarked on solo IVF. In 2022 she gave birth to her son, Tyko.
Maternity is hardly uncharted territory for pop music: 28 years ago Madonna reinvented her career and the possibilities for female artists with the album Ray of Light, which drew on her experience of becoming a mother at 38. It also — and this is where Sexistential is a departure — marked a break with Madonna’s sexy era.
Madonna on the Ray of Light music video setFrank Micelotta/ImageDirect/Getty
Hard as it is to believe today, before Ray of Light came out a consensus had started to form that Madonna might be (whisper it) over. After decades of semi-pornographic provocations she was near-geriatric by the standards of Nineties pop. So for Ray of Light she did the perhaps most shocking thing she could: kept her clothes on and discovered spirituality.
That launched her into her midlife career with a momentum that has kept her going all the way to the present. The switch to modesty was, it turned out, short-lived: the video for her most recent release, La Bambola, features her, at 67, wiggling in a basque and fishnet tights.
More regrettably, the shift in her lyrical concerns was short-lived too. After the similarly styled 2000 album Music, Madonna has never sounded so open and vulnerable. Her reversion to songs about clubbing and lust yielded some great tracks (let’s hear it for Hung Up) but also left the trail she blazed with Ray of Light for other artists to explore.
That has taken a surprisingly long time. But now, finally, a cohort of pop stars has arrived who are making unabashed bangers about female middle age. Robyn’s Sexistential comes on the heels of two hit albums last year that dealt with this previously unpromising subject: Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Perimenopop (the title is self-explanatory) and Lily Allen’s non-monogamy and divorce-themed album West End Girl.
Allen’s divorce album was a commercial successGetty
This is part of a bigger cultural moment for women in their forties and older. You could also include Miranda July’s outrageously horny perimenopause novel All Fours and the Nicole Kidman age-gap drama Baby Girl (which has lived in my memory less for the scenes of S&M than for the frank depiction of the extensive age-defying tweakments undergone by Kidman’s character). Vladimir, the TV adaptation of Julia May Jonas’s novel about the chaotic belated rumspringa of a middle-aged female academic (played by Rachel Weisz), is part of the same wave.
On the one hand, this reflects where Gen X and older millennial women are. Women who are in their forties and fifties grew up with the expectation that their lives would not come crashing to a halt when menopause set in. We expect pleasure, adventure and fertility, and we have a disposable income that makes it lucrative for art to reflect those aspirations.
But, especially in music, it’s also a pleasant side-effect of the way streaming has transformed the traditional shape of an artist’s career. Ellis-Bextor is a perfect case in point. In 2023 her song Murder on the Dancefloor — released in 2001 — was included in the memorable final scene of Emerald Fennell’s film Saltburn. That propelled Murder on the Dancefloor to No 2 in the UK charts and gave Ellis-Bextor her first US hit, revitalising her career and introducing her to an audience who had no idea that she had been famous in the Noughties. As she told an interviewer, her children’s generation (her oldest son is in his early twenties) mostly encounter music through TikTok where the age of the singer and the song are immaterial.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s exposure in Saltburn gave the singer her first US hitAlamy
That means an artist can stay relevant in a way that defies the ageist expectations once imposed by record companies: executives tended to assume teenagers would listen only to music by their peers. That’s very much not the case now, as demonstrated at the 2022 Glastonbury Festival when Olivia Rodrigo (then 19) invited Lily Allen to join her on stage to perform Allen’s song F*** You.
It was a moment that acknowledged Rodrigo’s artistic debt to Allen. In the 2000s, Allen’s bratty confessionals about disappointing boyfriends and self-doubt brought something fresh to pop music. Decades later, Rodrigo would cover similar ground on songs such as Good 4 U and Pretty Isn’t Pretty. By continuing the focus on a female perspective that Allen established, Rodrigo helped to make the space for Allen’s West End Girl.
You can see a similar relationship between Robyn and Charli XCX, who is 33. Robyn’s commitment to autonomy in the music industry and her passion for the club scene are an inspiration to Charli — something Charli gave a nod to when she gave Robyn a starring role on the remixed version of the song 360 from the album Brat.
Playful and brash but with moments of emotional clarity, Brat can be seen as picking up where Robyn’s Noughties trilogy of Body Talk albums left off: the raw yearning of Charli’s Talk Talk is a descendent of Robyn’s heartbreak on the dancefloor classic Dancing on My Own. Brat even has its own moment of “fertility pop”, I Think About It All the Time, in which Charli wonders whether she should pause her career to have a baby.
While Charli considers that question she can look to Robyn (and Allen and Ellis-Bextor) as proof that becoming a mother and embracing maturity in some ways doesn’t mean giving up on being creative. Robyn has said that making Sexistential was in part about a commitment to herself to “stay horny — it doesn’t even have to be about sex, but it’s feeling sensual and attracted to things that I enjoy”.
In 2023 André 3000 of OutKast released a flute album. When an interviewer asked why he wasn’t producing rap songs, he said: “I’m 48 years old. And not to say that age is a thing that dictates what you rap about, but in a way it does. I got to go get a colonoscopy. ‘What are you rapping about?’ My eyesight is going bad.”
Robyn has said that reading that interview was part of what convinced her that she needed to go in the opposite direction and make music that didn’t avoid the facts of middle age but instead approached them head on with beats, wit and horniness. After all, why can’t pop music be about every part of the human experience? There shouldn’t be anything cringe about that.
Sexistential is out on Young