Robyn - Sexistential [CD]

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 Åhlund, 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.”