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Thirty years into a career that\u2019s rewritten the pop rule book more than once, Sweden\u2019s Robin Miriam Carlsson, mononymically known as Robyn, has earned the privilege of getting self-referential. She pioneered the whole \u201cleft-of-center female pop\u201d field so many artists camp out in now, from Charli XCX to Lorde to Billie Eilish, and did it in the very center-of-pop era of the mid-2000s to early 2010s. As a dance floor deity, she\u2019s seen most of her tracks get remixed by other DJs and producers almost as soon as they drop, and one controversial cover<\/a> of her signature song has even racked up billions of streams, making it an even bigger hit than the original. So why shouldn\u2019t she get to reinvent a few herself, to follow in her own footsteps, so to speak, especially when it makes a bigger point?<\/p>\n On her first album in eight years, Sexistential<\/em>, Robyn and her longtime co-producer Klas \u00c5hlund remake \u201cBlow My Mind,\u201d from her third album Don<\/em>\u2019t Stop the Music<\/em>, released in 2002 (though not in the U.S. at the time). Originally<\/a>, the song was about the mind-blowing hotness of a paramour whom she begged, \u201cHey, babe, ravish me, love me till it hurts\u00a0\/ Don\u2019t you dare to leave, button down my skirt\u00a0\u2026 And you\u2019re the reason that I sing.\u201d But in the 2026 version<\/a>, Robyn instead urges, \u201cBaby, ravish me, tear into my flesh\u00a0\/ Button down my shirt, go on, make a mess\u00a0\u2026 Ain\u2019t you the cutest little thing?\u201d By the time she reaches \u201cLet me just crush your scrumptious little face,\u201d listeners will catch on that she\u2019s not talking to a grown-up lover anymore. It\u2019s now about Robyn\u2019s baby son, and the Dionysian riot going on now is breastfeeding.<\/p>\n By the time he comes of age, little Tyko will probably feel about that song the way you do when your mom shows your naked baby pictures to your date. (At least he\u2019s better off than Rufus Wainwright, who must live with his songwriter dad Loudon\u00a0III having commemorated his infancy with a song called \u201cRufus Is a Tit Man<\/a>,\u201d which didn\u2019t get any less awkward when Rufus turned out to be gay.) For the rest of us, any squeamish feelings engendered by the next-gen \u201cBlow My Mind\u201d are wholly intentional on Robyn\u2019s part. On Sexistential<\/em>, at its best, she explores how the romantic and erotic material of her youthful anthems might shift shape coming from a 46-year-old single mother, with a body still eager to make moves in both the boudoir and the club, but with accumulated aches muscular and emotional in, as Leonard Cohen once croaked, \u201cthe places where I used to play<\/a>.\u201d Through it all, she pledges to \u201cstay horny<\/a>,\u201d as she stated in the album\u2019s run-up, because where there\u2019s desire, no matter what for, there\u2019s life.<\/p>\n It\u2019s debatable how fully the gambit comes off. You may find yourself asking if you ever <\/em>want to hear anyone sing the words your unbearably cute scrumptious little face<\/em> in your dance-pop bangers, no matter how authentically it gets at the sensuality of motherhood in middle age. (\u201cIt\u2019s very punk<\/a>,\u201d Robyn has said.) Or else you could credit that she is doing it all, as always, with a sparkly wink and savor the delicious cringiness, or even ask how you got programmed to find songs about messy mothering more embarrassing than, say, songs about coked-up bathroom hookups. In this, Sexistential<\/em> is an album less for new converts than for the crowd who called Robyn \u201cMother\u201d long before Tyko came along in April 2022.<\/p>\n For those long-term fans, the enticement is that the dominant sound here is a gently updated throwback to 2010\u2019s Body Talk<\/em>, Robyn\u2019s most beloved period, the days of \u201cDancing on My Own<\/a>\u201d and \u201cCall Your Girlfriend<\/a>.\u201d Songs like lead tracks \u201cReally Real\u201d and \u201cDopamine<\/a>\u201d have the rubbery bass pulse, the staccato synth arpeggios scattering like summer rain, and Robyn\u2019s voice dancing between them, one foot in yearning sincerity and the other in coolly cyborgian \u201cFembot<\/a>\u201d mode. Sexistential<\/em> may be her first album in eight years, but it\u2019s her first album that sounds like this <\/em>in 16 years, because her 2018 album Honey<\/em> was a mellower, meditative immersion in reconciliation with grief and loss<\/a>. Now she\u2019s returned to the style that taught a generation of (mostly) white women, gay men, and music nerds to dance-cry in the club, to make them dare to dream they can feel those feels again.<\/p>\n