Sexistential finds Robyn at her most lucid

The choruses are massive, their chests bared. It has been eight whole years. The clarion call to return and cry on the dancefloor is overdue. And so, Robyn returns with Sexistential, her ninth suite of emotionally frank offerings, deftly coalescing her three-decade career into a more sage, still unctuous proclamation of liberation and self.

The chamfered, feathered edge of 2018’s Honey here takes on the harder outline of 2010’s Body Talk, reapplied in thick black marker on “Really Real”, where threatening bass synths bubble in with such a strong resemblance to Dixon & Stein’s Stranger Things theme that, for a moment, you would be forgiven for thinking an episode had started. Robyn and long-time collaborator Klas Åhlund forgo their “major leap” formula, instead recalling Robyn's work with Röyksopp on the totemic “Monument”, bellicose and martial.

“Dopamine” keeps that attention fixed, rolling in with a variation on the THX Deep Note before the onset of synth arpeggiation so easily attributable to Robyn’s sonic DNA. It is comforting, and the dreamlike lethargy of Honey lingers in the way Robyn plays against the rhythm, caressing the thrum of Åhlund’s chaotic, custard-thick production. There is growth behind her pen here; now self-aware that her ecstasy is chemically created, she will give into it as she ever has.

Nowhere is that more at play than on the rerecorded, recomposed “Blow My Mind”, originally a dreamy cut from 2002’s Don’t Stop the Music. Where that earlier version was whispered, blown out and, admittedly, still incredible, this 2026 rework repositions the song as an act of maternal adoration. It also marks a revolution in Robyn’s lyrical candour and “bigger picture” artistic sense, crafting a before-and-after that delineates the perspectives between 22-year-old Robyn then and 46-year-old Robyn now within, largely, the same song.

That meta-approach to self-celebration is symbiotic with what Sexistential is. On “Sucker for Love”, once you get past that opening “How Soon Is Now?”-esque synth line, it’s hard not to feel a pang of nostalgia evoked by the track's lithe pep, inescapable as Robyn’s vocal topline echoes the keys’ motif. It recalls the un-overthought brilliance of her 2005 self-titled album, where no singular component feels too laboured, each an earworm in-and-of itself.

Nor does she lose the slightly toe-curling earnestness Robyn has always been willing to brandish. The title track, a kind of personal-life inversion of the career frustrations aired on 2010’s “Don’ Fucking Tell Me What to Do”, is flinchingly diaristic, as Robyn details maintaining a sex life while undergoing IVF and seeking pleasure as a single woman amid donor-assisted pregnancy. Those concerns are presented together here, but they also open out into a separation of sex and motherhood that only Robyn could make feel this clear: motherhood need not require sex, and sex for pleasure need not precede motherhood.

Sexistential is Robyn at her most lucid, practicing at liberation and assuredness now with this singular caveat of reinhabitation that doesn’t celebrate Robyn as a pop iconoclast with thirty years of consistent brilliance on the scoreboard – or doesn’t only; rather, she wields that in the creation of a self-mythology that also manages to sound brilliant on its own merit.