Robyn: Dopamine Review – Complex Feelings and Instant Ecstasy: No Wonder the Pop No. 1 Hits Are Loving It | Robin

AAt the end of last year, during her triumphant concert at the O2, Charli XCX brought Robyn to the stage. In a sense, this was just the latest in a string of guest appearances on Pratt’s tour: a series of collaborators from the album and its subsequent remixes — Lorde, Billie Eilish, Troye Sivan and Addison Rae among them — showed up at various shows to perform their parts live. But in addition to contributing her verse to their 360 remix, Robyn also took center stage, performing her 2010 breakout single Dancing on My Own. Released when at least some of Charli xcx’s audience was still in diapers, it didn’t remotely sound like a throwback even in the context of a gig centered around one of 2024’s most iconic and agenda-defining pop albums: a star of the show who was willing to cede her spotlight felt like evidence of Robyn’s influence on contemporary pop.

You can see why the Swedish singer-songwriter has so much influence among pop stars in the mid-2020s. When she opened an album with a song called “No Fucking Tell Me What to Do,” she wasn’t kidding: After her breakthrough as a teen pop star in the 1990s produced by Max Martin, she rejected the usual constraints imposed on female pop music — walking away from not one but two major labels due to a lack of artistic control — and seemed intent on pursuing a more personal, complex, and messy path. She never saw being at the heart of mainstream pop as contradicting making music in depth, or touching on controversial issues. Despite the international success of her debut, Robyn Is Here, her second album, My Truth, was not released outside Sweden because her US-based label declined to release “Giving You Back”, a song about the abortion she had in 1998: when asked to remove the song, Robyn refused.

After gaining independence, she went on to collaborate with both blue-chip Swedish pop factories and a succession of experimental electronic artists, Knife and Röyksopp among them, at a time when the boundaries between mainstream pop and the musical left sphere were far from familiar. The 46-year-old, who released her first single in 1995, a year before the Spice Girls, appears to have more in common with pop artists half her age than with most of her peers.

So you could say that her first solo release in seven years was arriving at an opportune moment, if not for the fact that Robyn doesn’t seem to be doing anything particularly appropriate. Either way, dopamine is an amazing payoff. Her sound is euphoric and dancefloor-focused: four-to-the-floor house drum accentuated by a relentless percussive vocal sample, Giorgio Moroder-style chattering vocals, Daft Punk-like robotic vocals, trance-inducing bursts of arpeggio electronics, and a killer earworm chorus. It’s noticeably more neon than her last, reflective album, 2018’s Honey, but beneath its bright exterior lies something more complex.

It’s a song ostensibly about the first rush of falling in love, but it tempers its giddy excitement with a strange hint of desperation (“I just want to know I’m not alone”) and another dash of fatalism (“It’s going to be no matter what and that’s great”). There’s also a strange tension between trying to explain attraction as something scientific—an excess of the titular chemical—and something more spiritual and intangible: “There’s something opening up deep inside me / And I can finally feel it.” The lyric doesn’t exactly announce its hand: you can read it as a triumph of emotion over rationality, or you can equally read it as softening standard pop clichés with stark realism. It’s complex and messy: it’s also an unmistakable pop song. Which of course makes her very important for the moment, but it also makes her very Robin.