Robyn’s “Horny MILF” Album, Sexistential, Explores the Contrasts and Panoply of Human Emotions

As it the trend with OG women in pop music of late (including solo artists ranging from Madonna to Lily Allen to Hilary Duff), Robyn has taken her time with releasing a new album. In fact, she took so much time that it’s been eight years since her last one, Honey, came out. With her ninth record, Sexistential, Robyn keeps the number of tracks just as taut, sticking with lucky number nine.

Indeed, with such a sparse number of tracks (especially compared to some musicians who have been more, let’s say, long-winded in recent years [e.g., Beyoncé with Cowboy Carter and Taylor Swift with The Tortured Poets Department]), a large bulk of the songs have already been unleashed. Namely, “Dopamine,” “Blow My Mind,” “Talk to Me” and “Sexistential.”

However, the album kicks off with an as-of-yet unheard (until now) track called “Really Real” (side note: this is what Robyn was originally thinking of titling the record). With its thumping bassline (which sounds, particularly at the beginning, like it could be both part of a Tove Lo song and in an episode of Stranger Things), co-produced by Robyn, Jonathan Bates and Klas Åhlund, it’s clear that the immediate intent, as always, is to lure people out onto the dance floor. And, also as usual, Robyn infuses her dance floor-ready bops with emotionally charged and highly confessional lyrics. In this case, they’re all about Robyn having some major post-coital, sexistential dread. This considering that she’s already plotting to bolt, it seems, while still mid-fuck. A decision ostensibly revealed by the verse, “Tied up under your duvet/You’re mid-performance, I’m planning my escape.”

Considering Robyn’s general skittishness about love (as many of her past songs have spoken on), this is a reaction that makes sense. Plus, when taking into account that certain compositions on the album were inspired by her post-motherhood existence (though Robyn has specifically said, “It’s not about motherhood, it’s about the time before I became a parent”), it’s only natural that she might be wary of taking any man seriously as a legitimate “suitor” in that most men can’t “handle” a woman who has a child. Let alone a woman who has a son (Oedipal tensions and all that rot).

So it is that Robyn doesn’t have time to play games or beat around the bush, commanding/demanding, “Tell me how you feel/Is it real?/Is it really real?” A question, incidentally, that still-sentient people ask themselves every day upon witnessing another news cycle. But where Robyn is concerned, “real” refers to a matter of acknowledging how, pre- and post-sex, “We’re splitting up reality.” Further adding that her “double-dipping” choice, as it were, is to “slip out through the crack in between it” (sexual innuendo probably intended).

Alas, it seems as if, try as Robyn might, she can’t avoid full-stop reality as she realizes that the “split” is ultimately between an erstwhile “unity” of her and this other person’s feelings. That formerly united feeling being, “Let’s fuck.” Unfortunately, after that happens, both people in the bedroom might have very different emotions (or lack thereof) afterward. Which is why Robyn laments, “We checked and there’s been no mistake/Yeah, I’m afraid that feeling’s not going away/It’s too late, there’s no one to save you/So this is where the shared experience ends.” Of going from a “shared” experience to severed one, Robyn told Capital Buzz, “You’re in the same room, but your interpretation of what’s going on might be totally different, and that creates a lot of anxiety.”

An anxiety that one can feel through both the music and her vocal intonation. Particularly during a feigned conversation of her calling up her mother sounding a bit tipsy as she says, “Hi, Mom, what time is it where you are?” She then answers herself as if she’s her mother, replying, “Don’t worry about it, you can call me any time, älskling. Just make yourself a cup of tea and go to bed.” Wise words, even if a bit on the British side…

Providing the perfect transition to the themes of “Really Real” is “Dopamine.” A song that addresses how even though she knows “it’s just dopamine/…it feels so real to me.” But what is real when one is basing it on the intense rush of a dopamine hit. What’s more, for Robyn, the song isn’t “just about love” but also “the way we’re so addicted to our phones and so addicted to understanding ourselves through statistics.” Getting one’s dopamine hit in that way instead of turning to a more “analog” resource like love or sex anymore. Though Robyn tries to remind why such things might be more appealing/natural for dopamine purposes when she sings, “I’m tripping on our chemistry/It’s firing up inside of me.”

But in order for it to do that, Robyn needs to take a new approach in how she deals with romance, declaring, “I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve/I need to get out of this rubber coat” (yet another phrase on the album that’s laden with innuendo). Even so, in the accompanying visual, it isn’t a romantic love interest she incorporates, but rather, the love/daily dopamine hit that is her son. A choice that ties in with her decision to rework a twenty-four-year-old song called “Blow My Mind,” which originally appeared on her 2002 album, Don’t Stop the Music. And, in that context, it was a rather sensual song. In fact, it still is even though Robyn has now directed it toward her son, for as she said, “It made sense to turn ‘Blow My Mind,’ which is a love song, into a different kind of love song.” Even though it, at times, actually sounds raunchier and more sexual than it did before.

In this regard, perhaps Robyn is boldly daring to go where few mothers who are musicians have gone before by still branding her relationship with her son as “sensual,” also telling Capital Buzz, “That’s what this album is, I’m trying to describe duality, I’m trying to describe contrasts and the contradicted feelings that I was feeling in this period. And, for me, being close to my son was that… and much more sensual than I had imagined it to be.”

So yes, that might entail a bit of competition for any potential romantic love interest that tries to enter her life. But that doesn’t mean Robyn isn’t still a “Sucker for Love.” The fourth track on the album that also connects to “Dancing On My Own” in that she’s now writing a song from the perspective of not being a victim of love, but someone who is open and ready to receive it, even while knowing the emotional cost she’ll likely incur as a result.

With a musical opening that sounds tailor-made for riding a motorcycle through a tunnel (in fact, Robyn said of the song, “I just imagine myself, like, sitting on a motorbike, looking really tough with, like, a tear on my cheek”), her siren-sounding (as in the mermaid, not the police car) vocal moan also channels a touch of Bronski Beat on “Smalltown Boy.” Which immediately conveys just how vulnerable this song is going to be, with themes that echo MARINA’s 2019 track, “Soft to Be Strong.” Particularly when MARINA describes, “I know it’s hard to be soft/I know it hurts to be kind/I know that when love is lost/It’s only fear in disguise/And I guess I’ve known it all along/The truth is, you have to be soft to be strong/Finally, I feel the fear is gone/I found out love has to be soft to be strong.”

Robyn has a similar revelation when she tells the object of her affection and/or anyone that would mock her for “falling,” “You think I’m soft/Like that’s a flaw somehow/You’ve got me figured out/And I/I’m not that tough/Who wants to be that way?” (Toxic males, that’s who.) She then doubles down on the power of being vulnerable with the lines, “I’m not a sucker/I’m a sucker for love” and “I don’t wanna play no more/And I don’t even care who wins/I used to have thicker skin/But I choose to let you in.” And why not, after all, when, in the end, “It Don’t Mean a Thing.” Otherwise known as what Madonna would bill as “Nothing Really Matters.” And that’s what Robyn has to tell herself as well as she gets over a relationship that didn’t work out.

Worse still, the ex in question wants to act as if they can continue being friends, something Robyn refers to when she sings, “You wanna keep it civilized, I’m not that zen/But it don’t matter/It don’t mean a thing.” In other words, she’s going the Kali Uchis route of essentially saying, “You’re dead to me” now that this person fucked it all up. During the bridge of “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” Robyn even gets in the dig, “All the cute little jokes that we had, I forgot ‘em/Someone told me you’re writing again and it’s not it/Can’t recall how it felt even if I remember/No, it don’t mean a thing.” And just like that, as Carrie Bradshaw would say, one manages to get over someone they were once closest to. A bittersweet reality accented by the 80s sensibility of the song, which shares some sonic DNA with the likes of Yazoo thanks to co-production from Åhlund and Elvira (who has lately made an even bigger name for herself by co-producing Addison Rae’s debut album, Addison).

Fortunately, Robyn isn’t one to close her heart permanently just because she’s had a bad experience (or twenty). And this is why “Talk to Me” is the perfect song to follow up “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” with Robyn presenting herself as being ready to love (or lust after) a new romantic prospect again. Thus, she urges, “Talk to me/Talk to me till I’ve arrived.” Okay, so it’s kind of a phone sex anthem (further proof that Robyn dgaf about proudly parading her age), filled with other kinks like wanting to be watched as she gets off (“‘Cause sometimes I need an audience”). Accordingly, it’s a track that radiates an aura of freedom and total loss of inhibition as Robyn lets herself “surrender to the pleasure” (like Madonna says on “Best Night”). Hence, the orgasm allusions in the verse that goes, “Feel it building up, it’s exponential/For you/Damn, I’m feeling so sexistential.”

And, while on the subject of that term that Robyn, like, invented (à la FKA Twigs with “eusexua”), it’s the song that serves as track seven. For perhaps she was saving it for a placement toward the end of the record because of how bold it is, lyrically speaking. To be sure, someone like Madonna would never get this candid about the pratfalls of trying to date as an older woman while also going through IVF. And even though Madonna also provided an illustrious “white girl rap” during 2003’s “American Life,” it sidestepped anything that involved allusions to being “a certain age.” But Robyn is unbothered and unburdened by speaking the truth that applies to her now, at this moment in her life. Which means rapping, “I been on Raya while on IVF/PTSD from all the tests/Hormonal rants on IG/Scrolling my feed while breastfeeding.”

After oozing all that raw sexual and hormonal energy, Robyn shifts gears to a slower, gentler jam called “Light Up.” Something of a “ballad” in the Robyn sense of what that means, her earnest tone encourages the one she’s got her eye on to, “Light up the way to your heart/One flash is enough to keep me out of the dark.” Such lyrics as effusive and “beaming” as these can apply as much to her maternal dynamic with her son as they can to a romantic prospect. The same goes for her The Wizard of Oz-esque line, “And technicolor breaks the black-and-white illusion/So baby, light up.”

However, there are other moments in the song when it seems patently less like “motherly love.” Case in point, when she belts out, “I’m just trying to be your girl/I lost you but I wanna be better/Wanna face up to my issues for real.” Whoever she might be speaking to in this verse, one can only hope she has faced up to her issues “for real.” That word—real—being arguably the most constant motif throughout the album, as Robyn searches for what it even means for something to be deemed as such.

By the time “Into the Sun,” the grand finale of Sexistential arrives, it appears as if Robyn no longer cares either way if she can fully establish what’s real/reality. So long as she can trust the way she feels about something (or rather, someone), maybe, just maybe, none of the rest matters (a.k.a. it don’t mean a thing). To get that sentiment across, Robyn leans more heavily on the musical backing (which has a decidedly 80s/Janet Jackson-esque sound), produced by Åhlund and Oscar Holter, to capture a feeling of letting go and “flying right into the sun,” as Icarus did. And, like that misguided mortal, Robyn, too, is willing to take a chance if it means opening her heart anew to the prospect of love. For, as she puts it, “I might be wrong/And burn on the entry/It’s my last crusade,/You know I fight it/Just to make sense of my mistakes/Look what I’ve done/So brave and dumb/Fly right into the sun.”

And with that, Robyn leaves her listeners with plenty to think about, even though she’s only been with them for just nine songs. Something that Capital Buzz asked her about when inquiring what she thinks the ideal length of a pop album should be. To which she replied, “Don’t you agree that long albums usually get boring?” Undeniably, they do with certain musicians, but one imagines Robyn could keep a listener engaged for far longer. However, she’s clearly learned something from so many years of “the hunt” in romance: always leave them wanting more.

Described as her “horny milf” album, it’s only right that Robyn looks the part of a crazed/struck-by-Cupid’s-arrow type on the cover of Sexistential, which finds her in a state of undress as she appears unapologetically feral. The quality that all humans can’t help but “reverting to” sooner or later. Particularly if they surrender to being vulnerable. As Robyn entreats all of us to be with each and every one of her albums.