Iain Duncan Smith is very worried that women are not having enough babies. Swedish pop queen Robyn may have the answer.
Duncan Smith’s think tank, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), released a report last week predicting disaster if the birth rate doesn’t pick up. Fortunate, then, that Robyn’s new album, released this week and her first in eight years, is the best advert ever made for having children.
Inspired by Robyn’s peri- and post-natal self-discovery on having her son in 2022, Sexistential is consistently euphoric. The sentiments of the title track, however, probably do not really align with the CSJ’s values.
A spare, fractured rap, it narrates Robyn’s experience of seeking hook-ups on dating apps while pregnant, having used a donor and IVF to have the child on her own (“I’m already ten weeks in maternity/ Fuck a single mom, I’m not judgmental”). Since the CSJ have partly blamed responsibility-shy men for Britain’s “birth gap”, Robyn presents a solution that certainly seems to have worked for her.
This is a taboo-smashing exploration of female desire during pregnancy that is unprecedented in pop. Never afraid to be outspoken, Robyn has still surpassed herself here, and the addition of a colourfully put shout-out for her celebrity crush, Marriage Story/Star Wars actor Adam Driver, and reference to the dangers of shopping on Etsy while breastfeeding, give this track a humorous edge that just makes it all the more audacious.
Robyn was once bound for much less edgy territory. Pop Svengali Max Martin was behind her 1995 debut album, released when she was just 16. Her image – a diminutive white girl with attitude singing R&B-inflected pop – was the blueprint for Britney Spears, and Martin would launch the more malleable American teenager to international superstardom three years later.
Robyn’s refusal to be an industry puppet delayed her own global success by a decade and a half. The international release of her second album was blocked when she refused to sanitise Giving You Back and 88 Days, songs about her experience of abortion that were every bit as lyrically devastating as Stevie Nicks’ Sara.
After a further album that also failed to break out beyond the borders of Sweden, Robyn was thoroughly disillusioned with mainstream pop and was facing her career ending without a second act. Founding her own label, establishing a creative partnership with Klas Åhlund of legendary alternative rock band Teddybears, and pivoting to a new paradigm – minimal electronica and exquisite heartbreak – resulted in a self-titled album that saw her reborn in 2005.
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But it was 2010 LP Bodytalk that sealed Robyn’s status as the most influential pop artist of the new millennium, as well as the most ballsy. Call Your Girlfriend, where “the other woman” is advising her boyfriend on how to dump his partner sensitively, rejected behavioural expectations, while tracks like Fembot grappled with the social constraints put on modern women. Coming a full eight years later, and informed by personal loss, the more musically sparse Honey was another major change in Robyn’s sound.
That Sexistential is a musical return to form is clear right from the opener, Really Real. Sublime in its scale, it seems to find Robyn launching into orbit, before a handful of Robert Fripp-style guitar dashed across the song’s shimmering surface elevates it into something truly inspired. Across the rest of the album, clear inspiration is drawn from the likes of Daft Punk, Prince and Yellow Magic Orchestra.
But while the introspection of Honey was a deliberate rejection of her “saint of heartbreak” image, Robyn transcends that role completely on Sexistential as she discovers motherhood as a relationship beyond the romantic and a route to a more expansive, completely self-possessed sensuality.
On that title track, Robyn is high on the invigorating terror of making a deliberate, socially aberrant choice. “There’s no cute feelings,” she has said about IVF, “it’s really technical, and that was empowering.”
Here she’s a primitive Mother Goddess anachronistically landed in the space age: “My body’s a spaceship with the ovaries on hyperdrive/ Got a whole universe inside that exists in between my thighs”. The lines “Fuck a therapist, It’s not mental/ I need philosophy, this shit is existential” is a genius summation of how parenthood wholly deconstructs identity and purpose.
While Blow My Mind finds room for conventional sentimentality (a mother can be forgiven for immortalising her child’s “unbearably cute scrumptious little face” on record), its riffing on the intimacy of breastfeeding in borderline erotic language is yet more taboo-smashing. Only Björk’s primal incantation Mouth’s Cradle comes close to this.
“When it feels like there’s something that’s not really OK to talk about, that’s the point when you’re in danger,” Robyn has said of hanging on to her artistic daring as she gets older. At nearly 47, and after three decades of music-making, she has proved with this album that there is no sign of her courage waning.
“I might be wrong/ And burn on re-entry” she sings on the epic closing track Into The Sun; as a record about feeling the fear and doing it anyway, Sexistential is thrilling.
Sexistential by Robyn is released on March 27 through Konichiwa Records/Young
