Album of the week: Robyn – 'Sexistential'

Furrowed-brow talk about a comeback artist’s “journey” are de rigueur and, usually, de boring. Their back catalogue is a bit spotty. Their fortunes dipped. This time round they junked a few early song ideas. The record label got on their pip. They fell out with the bass player, and with the delivery guy who supplied muse-boosting 3am matcha lattes to the studio.

But Robyn: she’s been on a passage through the music industry and through life that’s so odyssean – not to mention, at times, Sisyphean – it’s a surprise Christopher Nolan hasn’t directed her new pop videos.

Signed in her early teens in her native Sweden on the strength of music the adolescent had written about her parents’ divorce. A second album the world outside her homeland refused to release because of the lyrics about abortion. A rebuttal of a US label’s overtures, which led them to seek out an “American Robyn”, using her producer Max Martin, the result of which was Britney Spears and ‘…Baby One More Time’. Ending up on that label anyway when her label bought that label. A stunning trilogy of mini-albums in one year (2010’s Body Talk). A stone-cold classic in the shape of that era’s ‘Dancing on My Own’, the sad banger that someone, somewhere, is smile-sobbing to right now.

Then, in the eight years since her last album, Honey, Robyn decided to undergo IVF as a single parent while also getting fruity on the apps. And now, here she is at 46, back back back with ninth album Sexistential, on a new hip new label (Young, home of the xx, FKA twigs and Kamasi Washington), reunited with Martin and with longtime collaborator Klas Åhlund, being shot for edgy magazine covers by provocateur-in-chief Juergen Teller, and making (oh yes) some of the best music of her 30-year career.

These nine perfectly judged tracks are Robyn having fun, cutting loose, leaning into everything she’s learned in those three decades. ‘Dopamine’ was the appropriately mood-boosting first single, an icy-cool electro party anthem from a heat-seeking fortysomething. ‘Sucker For Love’ is a minimal synth art-bop that sounds more like early Eighties Sheffield than 21^st century Stockholm. ‘Talk To Me’ is the shape-throwing, dancefloor-sparking result of her reunion as co-writer with Martin, one of the pre-eminent ultra-pop hitmakers, well, ever.

And then there’s title track, a roof-raising and indeed eyebrow-raising masterpiece of detail, confession and celebration. ‘Sexistential’ is a libidinous, suitably throbbing, mommie-horniest melodrama in which Robyn raps about the hormonal hurricane of a middle-aged mother-to-be with “ovaries on hyperdrive”. The rest of the lyrics? Glad you asked. “F*ck a app, I need me some IRL / I'm on the clock, just give me your ASL / F*ck a Plan B, baby, it's no big deal / I'm already 10 weeks in maternity / F*ck a single mom, I'm not judgemental / In my sweatpants, and some juicy hentai / F*ck a therapist, it's not mental / I need philosophy, this shit is existential.”

While I’m googling “hentai”, the picaresque continues, to a meeting with her doctor, discussion of her dream donor and how “Adam Driver always did kind of give me a boner”. I’ll just leave that there, save to say that, this summer, Robyn is on tour, at arena-scale. The sound of 10,000-plus fans bellowing that line nightly already feels like the unlikeliest concert singalong moment of the year, alongside “who the f*ck is Madeline?”.

Upwards, onwards, outwards, very forwards: now that’s a journey.

Sexistential is out now via Young