With sensible bridges straddling blue water from the Baltic Sea, Stockholm feels peaceful, bearing gifts of decompression for weary souls. “It’s really clean, and the air is fresh,” Robyn says, just after warmly greeting me with a hug at the door of her stately, multi-story home, just a few minutes walk from the center of the city. While many artists run from their origins, Robyn’s never strayed far from her Swedish roots, mostly because Stockholm’s compact size allows her to be closer to nature and to get more things done on a daily basis, and because her family and some of her key musical collaborators live here too. “Plus, Swedes have a good sense of humor,” she says. “It’s quite dark and dry.”
Atmospheric tranquility follows me into the first floor of her living quarters. Comfy sofas and stacked plastic storage tins brimming with folded clothes give way to an intimate kitchen and an all-purpose rehearsal room with free weights and plush yoga-style mats. This is where Robyn takes at-home samba lessons. It’s also where she writes and records some of her music.
In the room, an idea board hovers above her workstation. For creative inspiration, she’s pinned up an ’80s photo of Kate Bush as well as Tina Turner haughtily dressed in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome garb. Robyn wakes her computer out of sleep mode, and we dive into some of the tunes that inspired her first album in eight years, Honey—everything from the lilting disco of George McCrae to the toe-tapping bump ’n’ breeze of Vince Montana Jr.’s Goody Goody to the off-kilter alternative pop of Arthur Russell to the ambient 3 a.m. minimalist club beats of DJ Koze.
Robyn’s Spotify playlists, neatly organized into labeled folders and separated by month, are a reminder that she’s long been a thinking person’s pop star—sharply focused, concise, painstaking and hyper-aware (even though she claims to be a bit groggy on this particular weekend morning). In spite of—or maybe because of—Robyn’s meticulousness, Honey is her most intuitive album, more freeform in song structure and experimentally produced than the pop she’s delivered before.
Born Robin Carlsson in the summer of 1979, Robyn first came to public attention in 1995: Her debut album, Robyn Is Here, positioned her as the European answer to Brandy and Monica, and featured a Top 10 hit with “Show Me Love.” Robyn’s anxious record label shelved the global release of her sophomore 1999 album, My Truth, over concerns about abortion-themed lyrics. But the singer rebranded herself on 2005’s Robyn, tapping into an aggressive electro sound that mined the likes of Eurodance, dancehall, and Madonna-inspired avant-electronica. Newly entrepreneurial (she started Konichiwa, her own record label) and self-determined à la Control-era Janet Jackson, Robyn came to epitomize the surging, dance-positive, all-markets poptimism of the 2000s.
She morphed into an alternative pop diva—accessible rather than aloof, defiant rather than demure, sassy rather than staid, independent rather than establishment—and positioned herself differently from the late 2000s array of irreverent “bad girls” like Britney Spears, Lily Allen, and Amy Winehouse.
But the real secret to Robyn’s enduring appeal has always been her robust songwriting. Battleship dancefloor anthems of resilience like “With Every Heartbeat,” “Indestructible,” “Dancing on My Own,” and “Call Your Girlfriend” tap into distinctly Scandinavian notions of tristesse and hardscrabble perseverance; they came to define the best of millennial-era, queer-friendly, emotionally trenchant dance pop. At the core of all this creative output is the passionate sincerity of Robyn’s singing voice: tremulous, anti-histrionic, powerfully direct, her unadorned sound can make you crumple into a ball of tears and feel enormously glad to be alive at the same time.
Honey is a breathless, existential post-disco record. Since her last proper album, Body Talk, Robyn underwent significant psychoanalysis to find personal meaning in the aftermath of the death of her longtime friend and collaborator Christian Falk, as well as from a debilitating romantic breakup in 2014 with her boyfriend, director Max Vitali (they’ve since reunited). Bringing to the table those profound psychological discoveries, Honey veers from bluesy melancholy to joyful abandon, traipsing across styles, ideas, and musical eras, partly on account of its hopscotched production in Stockholm, Los Angeles, and Paris recording studios. At a turbulent global moment marked by political strife, collective trauma, and the fear of everything falling apart, Honey celebrates the human commitment to a rigorously examined emotional life.
While Honey doesn’t directly take on the anguished, soul-crushing state of contemporary politics, its insistence that we take personal responsibility for our own healing and recovery from trauma makes it feel essential right now. Over a couple of hours, my conversation with Robyn covers a wide array of subjects: her concern over the rise of the reactionary, far-right populist Swedish Democrats party that recently captured significant electoral victories riding on a platform of anti black and brown migration (“There’s nothing about their politics that’s OK, and because people voted for them there’s a conflict somewhere about immigration that has to be addressed”); the roots of racism (“There’s this really strong mechanism in the brain that needs to organize things to understand the world, because it’s so complex, and the laziness of it is just depressing”); and cultural appropriation and the #BlackLivesMatters movement (“From the bottom of my musicality I’m inspired by black music; I’m totally aware of where I’m pulling from, but I think there’s been a new understanding for me about how sensitive you have to be”).
Robyn also shares her personal thoughts about the groundbreaking #MeToo movement, reflecting on her journey to personal independence by starting her own label and by carefully curating the mostly male collaborators with whom she works. Though Robyn has created for herself a degree of insulation from sexism in the music industry, she’s hardly immune to it in the wider world. “Just yesterday I was walking across the bridge,” she says, “and these two guys recognized me and were calling my name, and I didn’t respond. Then I looked up and they shouted at me, ‘Robyn, you’re getting old!’ I don’t think they would have said that to a man. It was a good reminder that even though I’m somewhat protected, that feeling is there all the time, for many girls, many women.”
Delicate and full of deep feeling, Honey is a welcome musical antidote to the insidious threats that continue to encircle, circumscribe, and diminish women everywhere—it’s the work of a 39-year-old pop icon drawing on the treasured history of spiritual dance music to celebrate her own bodily freedom and emotional maturation in a changing cultural climate. In that spirit, Robyn walks me, track by track, through Honey.
1. “Missing U”
Robyn: I started this song in the summer of 2014, upstairs in my apartment on my laptop. I made this beat with my LinnDrum machine and this software synth that I’ve used on all my demos. I was just interested in these chords that reminded me of something that my parents would listen to in the ’80s, when pop music was really soft and warm, like Kate Bush.
I wrote the chorus, the verse, the melody, and some of the lyrics there, but the song made me really depressed—it was about some heavy shit, and I didn’t know what it was yet. I broke up with my boyfriend, and my really good friend passed away from cancer. I tried to finish those lyrics for about two years and I couldn’t. I really waited and waited, and then I finished them with [producers] Joseph [Mount] and Klas [Åhlund] in 2016.
My demo of “Missing U” has the same chords but it’s very different. Joseph pulled out this bright sound effect, this feeling of light hitting water, in that arpeggio. He really put his finger on this kind of sadness: It’s quite exciting, even though it’s really painful. Arpeggiators stretch your brain and make you listen to all the different notes and harmonics in a song, but you can also just have it play a few notes, and then your brain starts filling in the gaps. On this record, the arpeggios are still there, but I tried to make them less even, less stiff, less on the 16th notes, and with a different groove.
“Missing U” is really about the psychedelic, trippy thing that happens when people are not there anymore, and how clear they become all of a sudden, and how you deal with the fact that there’s this big space in your life. In the beginning, there’s no segue between your life and that place where that person used to be. That’s what healing is about: finding ways through that space where that person was. After a while, it starts becoming about connection to other people instead, or to yourself.
2. “Human Being”
I had just read the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari and I was inspired by the way that he described our relationship to animals. He wrote about what the future will be like, and how is AI going to treat us. The only other relationship we have with another form of life that would be similar to how AI would relate to us is how we treat to animals. So I wrote the song as if AI had taken over the world, and the human beings were the minority. AI will do everything better than us, maybe even have emotions. What is it that’s so special about us really? And if you take that away, is there any value still left in being human? I think the value is being connected to other people.
3. “Because It’s in the Music”
I wrote it about a particular night, but also it came from just hearing Joseph’s track—it sounded very disco for me in this special way. It was interesting to write a song about disco music on a track that reminded me of disco. The lyric is about how there are songs that you connect to certain people. I wanted it to be like when you listen to a song that you know someone else had a relationship to, and maybe it’s over, and you don’t know if that person feels the same way and thinks about you. I wanted the bridge to just be bass and drums, but Klas and Joseph had these other ideas. Joseph basically wrote a new song—he said, “I’m going to write the song that this song is about”—and we put it in at the end. Also, Klas performed a flamenco solo for this song—but we all agreed to leave it off.
4. “Baby Forgive Me”
It’s about power dynamics in a relationship. It’s about hurt. In a way, maybe it’s a submissive song. But it’s also quite an aggressive thing to demand someone to take you back. I don’t know if forgiveness is possible. Maybe it is. I’ve asked people to forgive me many times. Forgiveness is also something that can be discussed. It can be negotiated.
When I was writing this song, I was thinking of “Streets of Philadelphia” by Bruce Springsteen. The energy of it. The mood. For me, that song is a version of disco.
5. “Send to Robin Immediately”
It’s a song that I made with Kindness [Adam Bainbridge] right at the end of making the album. The file that Adam sent me was called “Send to Robin Immediately.” I played it for a friend, and he saw the file and said, “Is that the name of the song?” I said, “No, but maybe it should be.” The title stuck.
In the aftermath of losing people, you realize how important it is to appreciate them when you have them. Also, when you come out of a rough period, it becomes about the appreciation of life, of being here and having the things that you have, like friends and music. I wouldn’t say that making music is my therapy, but music does makes me feel like I want to be alive. There’s nothing that makes me feel as in love with my life like music.
6. “Honey”
The song was recorded in many different places: Sweden, Paris, L.A. All of those vocal sessions made it into the final recording. I was in a particular mood when I was writing it, and the lyrics talk about going to a sensual place, in the same way I talk about making music because it makes me feel good, that it’s a playful thing, something that I can do that soothes myself if I do it in the right way.
I called the album Honey because of what this song means to me, and how it was important to the making of the record. Maybe “Honey” describes a state of mind instead of the actual substance. To get myself back into actually enjoying making music again, I had to do it in a sensitive way. There’s a sensuality that came out of that, that I wanted to achieve.
7. “Between the Lines”
Throughout the whole album, I was interested in rhythms that that get repeated in many different ways in dance music. [She sings a ’90s Crystal Waters-style synth dance rhythmic pattern]: That was just something I was hearing. I was playing around, and Klas got into it, and we kind of freestyled that whole song. Sometimes you imitate stuff until you make something of your own.
Once you get into this way of relating to dance music in a club that’s really about being in the space you’re in and feeling your emotion with the people that are there and just enjoying it together, the music changes. It started to inform how I was writing music and how I wanted my music to be. Pop songs have their peaks, but with club music, it’s about the groove and liking where you’re at in that moment, riding a wave. Dancing changed my way of listening to music.
8. “Beach 2K20”
Me and Rudolf [Nordström, aka Mr. Tophat] started working on the track in a house in Ibiza a few years ago. But it’s really Rudolph’s track: He’s the one who created that world. And I loved it. It was kind of like “Send to Robin Immediately”: I just heard something that I was really inspired by and I wrote a song on it. We worked with analog synths and the vocals and arranged it all together. I work that way a lot: Rudolf will make stuff, and I will edit it, we’ll take turns. He is so amazing at creating music that can put you in a trance.
Maybe that beat is inspired by my samba lessons. I always loved samba music—it makes me cry. I had to learn how to dance to samba because the music is so moving to me. My friend has been dancing for a long time—when I was low and wasn’t making music she would come by and give me lessons.
9. “Ever Again”
This was a song me and Joseph wrote right at the end of making the record. We needed a break from “Honey,” as we’d been working on it for so long and it was so tiring. Joseph started playing these chords on his synthesizer, and I really liked them, and we changed them around a little bit together. And then the chorus just came like that [snaps fingers]. It was so nice to write something at the end of making the record where you have the whole thing in your system and you can add to it in this very natural way.
It’s an optimistic lyric. I don’t know if I’m an optimist—I used to be, but maybe not as much now. Things don’t always go well, that’s just how it is. I’m not a pessimist: I think there’s a lot of suffering that doesn’t make sense and it’s up to us to be responsible for what’s happened in our lives. I’m not always seeing the best outcome; it matters what you do. But the song is defiant in that maybe my heart will be broken again, but maybe I will think about it in a different way. Maybe I won’t let it destroy me.
Coming close to turning 40, I definitely feel more and more aware of my limitations as a human being. I don’t feel limitless like I did when I was 25 or 30. Now I can see the curve of life happening in a certain way. But because of that, I feel much freer as a person.
