Robyn will finally break a nearly eight-year album hiatus on March 27 with Sexistential, a nine-track release on new label Young. On the heels of first single “Dopamine” in November, the Swedish pop favorite today (Jan. 7) unveiled two more tracks, including the title cut and “Talk to Me.”
A Casper Sejersen-directed video for the latter can be sampled below, while Robyn will perform “Sexistential” tonight on CBS’ The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
“Exploring my sensual life is the same feeling as when I make a good song,” Robyn says. “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.”
Robyn and producer Klas Åhlund say they wanted Sexistential to feel “like a spaceship coming through the atmosphere at a really high speed and crash landing. 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.”
“Talk to Me” was written during the COVID-19 pandemic in tandem with Max Martin, with whom she hadn’t collaborated since 2010. “I like talkers. That turns me on,” Robyn says. As for the title track, which the label says is “possibly the world’s first rap about having one-night stands while 10 weeks pregnant after IVF,” it was apparently inspired by Andre 3000 telling an interviewer that nobody would want to hear him rap about his colonoscopy. “It was my cue,” Robyn adds. “I have to do this. I have to write a rap about IVF.”
Before re-emerging late last year, Robyn had been quiet on the musical front since 2018’s Honey, which debuted at a career-best No. 40 on the Billboard 200. Since then, she’s made sporadic appearances on projects by Jamie xx, S.G. Lewis and Neneh Cherry, and has also popped up for surprise concert cameos with Gracie Abrams and Charli xcx.
The artist is widely known for her 2010 single “Dancing on My Own,” which has been streamed more than 413 million times on Spotify.
Here is the track list for Sexistential:
Really Real
Dopamine
Blow My Mind
Sucker for Love
It Don’t Mean a Thing
Talk to Me
Sexistential
Light Up
Into the Sun
