Sexistential

Sexistential is the most ecstatic record that Robyn has ever made, the sound of one of contemporary music’s most influential artists coming home. After the club music meditations of 2018’s Honey, the album features nine, deeply playful pop songs that tie back to her era-defining Body Talk trilogy, designed to feel “like a spaceship coming through the atmosphere at a really high speed and crash landing”, she says. “That’s how I felt, like I’d had all these experiences searching too far out into space, and now I’m crashing back into myself.” Co-produced mainly with longtime collaborator Klas hlund, Sexistential is emphatic and punchy, defiant about both emotional and biological pleasure, need and softness. The album’s title started life as an in-joke before she realised it said everything she wanted to say. “Exploring my sensual life is the same feeling as when I make a good song,” she explains. “It’s such a beautiful kind of sensitive vibration that takes so much work to keep afloat. I feel like the purpose of my life is to stay horny – it doesn’t even have to be about sex, but it’s feeling sensual and attracted to things that I enjoy, and not letting anything take over that.” To celebrate the news, Robyn released two new tracks from the album. Building on the success of acclaimed first single “Dopamine”, new singles “Talk To Me” and “Sexistential” further reveal one of the decade’s most celebrated comebacks. “Talk To Me” – produced by Klas hlund and Oscar Holter, and featuring Max Martin as a co-writer (their first collaboration since 2010’s “Time Machine”) – is pure, unadulterated fun, like Robyn trying to write a Prince or Gap Band song but underpinned with uber-contemporary production. “I wrote it during the pandemic when there was no way to be physical,” Robyn says. “I like talkers, that turns me on.”