There’s more than one reason they tell you not to reinvent the wheel. It’s to dissuade the people who don’t have the skills to do it, sure, but also to make sure you don’t find yourself in the dangerous profession of Wheel Reinventor.
While there are certainly worse things to be known for than reliably dealing in miracles, at 46, the stakes have never been higher for Sweden’s finest, Robyn, whose several new wheels have since set the stage for nearly three decades of pop music. At this tender crossing point between respected genre force and bona fide legend, what’s the right move? For her ninth studio album, Sexistential, she’s decided that a victory lap is in order. It’s time to leave the wheel alone.
It’s hard to argue that it’s not deserved. The emotional peaks and valleys of 2018’s Honey were previously uncharted territory, an unparalleled document of euphoria, longing, and catharsis set against a throbbing, rich backdrop of brooding dance music. Robyn‘s Body Talk inspired much of the melancholic/bombastic pop music of the century so far, publicly championed by torchbearers like Lorde, Charli XCX, Tove Lo and beyond.
It’s also not that her familiar tricks are somehow a drag. Sexistential boasts some inarguably stellar production, from the livewire synth hits of “Talk to Me” to the stuttering, pitch-shifting mayhem of “Light Up”. However, as a front-to-back listening experience, it’s hard not to feel like a kid on Christmas morning faking gratitude for the off-brand toy. It’s nice and all, but where’s my fucking new wheel?
Take “Sucker For Love”. It’s a perfectly bubbly piece of gonzo pop, fizzing over with a kinetic synth line that wouldn’t sound out of place on Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s last album, but its structure is simple, pleasant, devoid of surprise. “No love is no joke, and things will get broken,” she trills. We’ve been here before, too. By the time it finishes washing over in that tried-and-true way, it’s Good as in: not Amazing.
I wanted very badly to find the slinky and stupid title track charming, but the hackneyed talk-rap is emotionally taxing to say the least, lyrically chronicling a visit to a fertility doctor, dropping “boner”, “babymaker”, and “hentai”-related bars over two minutes that feel like a hundred years. Two decades ago, on “Konichiwa Bitches”, I felt tolerant, even reverent of Robyn’s cringe white lady braggadocio. Back then: “Don’t even get me started on my bada-boom-booms / One left, one right, that’s how I organize ’em / You know I fill my cups, don’t need to supersize ’em.” Like, okay, go off. So what’s going on today?
Robyn‘s reputation as the queen of crying on the dancefloor and of leftfield pop oddity precedes her in a way that cuts some of the moments on Sexistential off at the knees. When the pulsing “Dopamine” inevitably bursts into an animated final chorus, the effect is deja vu, not transcendence. Its lyrics are so Robyn-ish that they no longer feel vulnerable, but imprecise: an approximation of bloodlettings she’s let us be a part of before. I wanted to be listening to “Hang With Me”.
The song “Sexistenial” aims to show off Robyn’s off-kilter humor like “Bum Like You” and “Beach 2k20” both did, but it’s the one moment on the album that ages her, lost in the sauce of Internet ephemera. Watching the Late Show performance of it was the first time I’ve ever had “okay grandma, let’s get you to bed” feelings toward anything she’s touched. Outside of it, nothing on the album is patently bad, but the case remains that it’s easier than ever to predict her next move, song by song.
There are exceptions. “Really Real” really is incredible, menacing and clubby in a way that she hasn’t been in years, with a melody that unfurls like angel wings and a stilted spoken bridge that takes a page from Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” The chatty and charming “It Don’t Mean a Thing” sports an unfussy approach to melody that imbues every lyric with humanity. These glimmers of her firing on all cylinders make the rest less satisfying.
Maybe none of this is fair. Lots of pop singers spend their entire careers trying to reach the heights of Robyn’s B-Sides, and there’s an earnest, odd personality laced into Sexistential that I’d be crushed to go without. Ultimately, anytime Robyn graces us, it’s a blessing. Despite my gripes, there’s more than enough here to sustain another eight-year hiatus from making albums.
In the lead-up to the record, she’s discussed how it’s definitively not about her new motherhood, but rather a desire to explore “extreme contradictions” in her world: love and alienation, lovemaking and childmaking, action and potential. It might make sense, then, that, for better or worse, Sexistential embodies the contradiction in Robyn herself at this juncture of her career: she’s the blueprint, so she refers to herself. In the end, what’s so wrong with the wheel anyway?