Review of the Week: Sexistential by Robyn

A quick one first about tits. Is it me or are there a lot about lately? Among the musicians’ boobs I’ve seen winking at cameras on red carpets recently are those of Charli xcx, Doechii, Ellie Rowsell of Wolf Alice, Megan Thee Stallion, the Last Dinner Party’s Lizzie Mayland and Janelle Monáe. I’m no pearl-clutcher, but when US rapper Lil’ Kim flashed the flesh in 1999, it was confrontational. Now it’s starting to look like just another trend (although Chappell Roan did try something different with BDSM clamps at this year’s Grammys – a meta comment on how the nipple is never really free, perhaps?). 

And don’t get me started on the “naked dress”. 

It’s one thing to go topless to claim power over something that might have once made you feel insecure. But it’s not like all the men are getting their bits out as well. So when Robyn returned this year with her first album in nearly a decade, led by the giddy rush of her single Dopamine and a crest of hype that reinstated her at the top of the pop pantheon, it briefly crossed my mind that she was playing into the boobs-as-fashion dystopia too. In the artwork for Sexistential, she’s holding her breasts in place with her fists, or covering them in firework-like patterns. 

But, silly me, the Swedish pop artist has always been two steps ahead of everyone else. As the New Yorker put it in a recent profile, she was “a commodity at 16, a flop at 21, an indie darling at 26, and a cult icon at 31”. She survived the major label machine as a teen. She practically invented the sad banger, aka crying on the dancefloor. In the 2000s, she started a record label to release her music independently. Among the songs of love and loss, she’s written pop songs about abortion (which meant the US refused to release them). Now 46, her ninth album has taken its time because she did IVF, found a sperm donor and had a child on her own. Sexistential is as much about masturbation as it is lactation, being pregnant and being on dating apps. The boobs, then, are about reclaiming one’s sexual agency in motherhood. Tits as milk machines and weapons of mass seduction.

On her last album, 2018’s Honey, Robyn explored sensuality as she stood on the precipice of her 40s. But Sexistential has shrugged off that record’s airy sound and notions of romantic love and gone for full-throttle electro and other kinds of connection. At nine songs, it’s slight, but these new songs are bigger, chompier and more churning: on the opening track, it sounds as if she’s bursting through Tron’s Grid, or the AI vortex, with vitality and unbridled enthusiasm for human life. “Is it really real?” she asks as the digital sound effects stutter and smash, which help the album to hang together.

Sexistential was made mostly with her long-term collaborator Klas Åhlund but the shimmering electro-house number Talk To Me sees Robyn team back up with Swedish superproducer Max Martin, whom she worked with on her 1995 debut Robyn Is Here. The album is self-referential in this way, lasering in on the anthemic euphoria she’s celebrated for and making it a bit more cinematic, even sci-fi. She’s even covered her own Soulwax-adjacent electro 2002 song Blow My Mind, turning it into an ode to her child. Here, the original’s horny lyrics – “Baby, ravish me / Tear into my flesh / Button down my shirt / Go on, make a mess” – become a metaphor for breastfeeding (she later, in the same song, sings about her baby’s “scrumptious face”).  

But Robyn’s sound isn’t stuck in the 00s by any measure. Sucker for Love echoes the jaunty pitter-patter of As It Was by Harry Styles, whom she’ll be supporting in Amsterdam in May; It Don’t Mean a Thing has the phrasing of today’s 90s-referencing R&B. The party piece, however, is the title track, which comes later in the album: an inventive, if a bit short, bassline tune with a chonky beat where Robyn raps through a vocoder about sacking off apps, therapists and being a “single mom” and having a night out on the town instead. A song that rhymes “dream donor” with “give me a boner” should really be winning an Ivor Novello. 

Critics have linked Sexistential to Miranda July’s literary hit All Fours and its depiction of female desire in middle age. There certainly feels like a changing of the guard in terms of how women are embracing messy womanhood in the perimenopause and beyond. Give me Peaches dripping in lube with unmanicured pubes. Give me Robyn dancing with her pregnancy belly. Give me more female artists in their 40s and 50s taking up space and not giving in to society’s ageist expectations and narrow beauty standards. Now that’s something to get your boobs out for.

Sexistential is out now on Young

Kate Hutchinson is the Nerve's music critic. A writer and broadcaster, she’s behind the audio series The Last Bohemians, and the 2025 music podcast Studio Radicals, which Radio Times called "podcasting at its best". She currently presents a fortnightly show on Soho Radio.