When Robyn returned this summer, she was met by her adoring fans not as a queen nodding to her subjects, but more like the reappearance of badly needed weather—a shaft of light warming them. Her new single “Missing U” came with a sweet video featuring the DJs for Robyn Night, a themed dance party in Brooklyn where her faithful have congregated for years. “This is the community that your music has made,” party cofounder Russ Marshalek said earnestly into the camera. “She’s just brought a lot of joy into my life, so ultimately I just say thank you.”
How many pop figures inspire a devotion this pure? It’s fervent, but has no sharp edges—it’s hard to imagine Robyn stans bombarding the DMs of some poor soul who said an unkind word. Robyn fans don’t hate other pop stars’ fans; they don’t seek out negative tweets about their heroine and stage coordinated attacks. They just love Robyn. This kind of goodwill is something you cultivate carefully, and assiduously—it does not just come to you. The human spirit doesn’t tend to grow in such generous straight lines without careful tending. Robyn built this world of hers, and her fans throng joyfully inside it.
“Missing U” feels like a reintroduction. Yes, the Swedish pop star has never completely disappeared, but it’s been eight years since she released a proper album. Through all the holding-pattern EPs and single releases, there has been a distinct sense that she was holding out, awaiting larger inspiration. With “Missing U,” it seems like she’s found it.
The song opens with a glittering sunburst of synths, and the arrangement around them is nearly empty. Echoes ring out between Robyn’s voice and the thump of the kick drum, implying miles of separation. We’re left with a vague sense of encompassing desolation that snaps into focus the minute Robyn’s chorus arrives: “There’s this empty space you left behind.” Her word choice is simple but precise; it’s not “an empty space,” it’s “this empty space,” with all the helpless gesturing and grasping-to-understand “this” implies. The synths keep disappearing and then sneaking back in, much like the fragmented memories the song depicts. The phantom-limb tingle of a breakup or a loss is a universal emotion, and Robyn defines it so sharply in part because she defines it vaguely. She leaves lots of space for the disorientation that accompanies these feelings, complementing their emptiness.
The steeliness of Robyn’s craft isn’t always easy to point to, because the work she pours into her music is in service to triggering overwhelming emotions. If she succeeds, you forget, perhaps, that any work is happening at all. There is a selflessness to her that is unique to pop stars: She is there with you in her music, but remote; you are alone with her music, but not quite all alone.
She has been around, in one form or another, for a long time, and by now her presence in pop music is like fluoride in water. Thanks to the success of her 1995 debut, Robyn Is Here, and its attendant Max Martin-produced smash hit “Show Me Love,” she was famous before anyone knew the name “Britney Spears.” Then she disappeared from American shores for awhile, struggled to free herself from a record contract, established her own label, and re-emerged triumphant around 2007, when Britney Spears was skidding out dangerously in public, and Beyoncé was just a pop star, not yet an icon. By 2010, Robyn was strutting the pop landscape alongside a wave of artists, like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, who seemed to have drawn direct inspiration from her early hits. She’s everywhere, but impossible to pin down.
One of Robyn’s acolytes this decade, Carly Rae Jepsen, says the singer is among her favorite pop artists ever. “She has created such a unique sound that is so specifically Robyn,” Jepsen explains over the phone. “It’s this little world that she has tapped into, and no one else can really do it. It’s a fantastical place, and empowering, and it makes you feel like tonight is the only night that ever was or ever will be.”
Like Robyn, Jepsen became suddenly, blindingly famous on the back of a world-eating pop song and then had to figure out how to exist in its wake. With 2015’s E•MO•TION, she delivered a forceful answer to that question: She was going to live inside that brave-yet-vulnerable, awestruck space “Call Me Maybe” cleared, and she was going to paint that world a thousand different shades. The sneaky economy of Jepsen’s language—“I’ll find your lips in the streetlights”—and the enormous pulsing heart beating beneath the surface testify to a deep and sturdy love of Robyn’s work.
Jepsen singles out Robyn’s iconic 2010 single “Dancing on My Own” as her favorite. The song whispered its way into the pop consciousness, falling short of the Hot 100 in the U.S., but it was a lingering whisper—over the last eight years, it’s never actually gone away. It pops up on television constantly, from “Gossip Girl” to “Girls” to “Orange Is the New Black,” and has been subjected to countless covers. This year, it even has a weepy, soft-focus piano ballad cover by a guy named Calum Scott —a dubious honor, but one that speaks to just how universal a property the song is.
Talking about “Dancing on My Own,” Jepsen notes that the lyrics are “very visual”: Robyn’s narrator is lonely enough to notice the stuff on the floor—“stilettos and broken bottles”—that most people try to ignore, choosing instead to dissolve themselves into the speakers. It’s the kind of hard reality that Robyn neatly embeds into each of her escapist songs—escape doesn’t feel nearly as sweet, after all, without visceral reminders of confinement.
When I ask Jepsen which of her own songs feels most indebted to Robyn, she picks the airy and yearning “Love Again,” a bonus track on E•MO•TION. “It has that same sad-but-hopeful message, that idea that you get back up and keep going even when it feels like you’re heartbroken,” she muses. Jepsen’s lovestruck, wondering songs on E•MO•TION are full of imprecations to take her to the feeling. That feeling, in her songs, seems closely related to the tropical-house vibe that shimmers out of Robyn’s songs like bodysuit spangles. This is, in many ways, the Robyn Feeling: sad, exultant, vanquished, triumphant. Human romantic longing as epic unstoppable tide, something that might start from within but quickly engulfs from without.
Producer and songwriter Ariel Rechtshaid’s favorite Robyn song is “With Every Heartbeat,” the singer’s 2007 collaboration with Swedish producer Kleerup. “That song is a total fucking masterpiece,” Rechtshaid says. “I think it completely changed pop music. It helped invent a new genre that melded what people would consider credible, ‘indie’ artists—whatever that might mean—and pop.” Rechtshaid is probably allowed to generalize about this lane, because he works in it. He made the improbable leap from producing singer-songwriter Cass McCombs’ insular folk-rock records to working with… everyone, from HAIM and Vampire Weekend to Charli XCX and Sky Ferreira, from Madonna and Adele to Solange and Kelela.
“There’s something really special about the unity that Robyn’s managed, as far back as her ’95 debut,” Rechtshaid adds. “One of the great things about many pop artists, from Madonna to David Bowie, is that they morph, and you can’t pin down their aesthetic. But Robyn keeps coming back at the right time to give you what you want, and somehow it’s always good. She has been so relevant for so long. I’m sure she’s on the mood board for a lot contemporary pop artists.”
“There’s, like, a pain met with euphoria in that song,” says Rechtshaid of “With Every Heartbeat.” “If I was listening to the instrumental, I would feel what she’s saying even if she wasn’t there. It’s so potent. Something about that particular sound combined with her voice… I’m trying to figure out how to articulate my feelings!” He laughs.
This is a common theme from Robyn appreciators. Her music is shiny and without portals, like an iPhone; you can love it, but you can’t crack it open to see how it works. “It’s lot harder than it sounds to write songs that are so connected,” Rechtshaid says. “The way you would describe the emotions you are feeling while you are listening to the song are the lyrics to the song.”
Rechstaid stumbles onto a key insight here, and illuminates part of the reason Robyn’s music can feel so intangibly powerful. Everything in her music moves in the same direction. Often, lyrics generate sparks by moving against the music: The track suggests one thing, the lyrics another. Happy/sad; joyous/angry; sexy/despairing. There is something a lot darker going on in the music of, say, Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” than the breezy lyrics imply; the massive, martial-sounding synthesizer that touches down during the chorus suggests that the consequences for the dude who didn’t appreciate her will be a little more dire than just watching her dance up on some other guy. There’s a neat little trick, a juxtaposition, and you can point right to it.
Robyn’s music prioritizes seamlessness and unity. Her tracks feel like Robyn’s moods, her internal weather made manifest. When she sings, “Don’t go messing with love, it’ll hurt you for real/Don’t you know that love kills,” she sounds determined, grim, and defensive, and so does the track. When she walks you through the process of breaking up with your girlfriend so you can be with her instead on “Call Your Girlfriend,” she sounds sly and winsome and flirtatious and empathetic, and so does the track. You can wrap the whole thing around yourself, live inside of it, and still dance to it.
Dance music has a long history of unleashing exultant energies, but Robyn brings an element to that cresting wave that is less common: melancholy. Melancholy, historically, is largely an emotion that makes you drop your arms, hang your head, feel like a coat hanger holding up your own body. But in Robyn’s world, melancholy is blown up, glittering, transfigured. Her music acknowledges the weight of melancholy and pulls against it with apposite weight. The feeling Robyn’s songs want you to have is hard-earned glory: Glory within your own body, however gawky or awkward or weird you believe it to be; glory in your life, however lonely or sad you feel.
Robyn’s ability to make melancholy a fist-pumpable emotion is probably her most resonant artistic achievement, the single shining point around which her fans rally. It is precisely the feeling that Mike Hadreas, aka Perfume Genius, found in her music. “I usually look towards stuff that’s a lot more fucked up or sad,” Hadreas says. “That was the art that I found cathartic. Not something that raised me up. But her music doesn’t just lift you up. It lifts you up and consoles you at the same time.”
Hadreas notes the profound repetition of “With Every Heartbeat”: “It’s just so relentless," he says. “It just keeps building and building. She’s singing ‘And it hurts with every heartbeat’ over and over and over. But she’s still there, she’s still saying it. Her voice isn’t dying or fading. She wants you to know that she’s still there even though it hurts.”
“What I love about her is that she’s always going to be there for me,” he reflects, before laughing a little, presumably at how alarmingly sincere this reads. “I mean, I don’t know her. And it’s sort of a weird thing to project onto her, but I just trust her. The whole thing feels very genuine. I don’t feel like I’m projecting on her, for some reason. There are other pop stars that I love where I’m made aware of my projections; I don’t know if Rihanna is actually the Rihanna that I think about, for example. Robyn is mostly within her music, and is more of a companion to me.”
Like a lot of fans, Hadreas has his Robyn Story, the moment her music made him feel invincible. “I was living with my brother,” he remembers. “I had written a lot of my first songs, but nothing was really happening from them, and I was working at a department store. I hadn’t really gotten sober for real, or anything. I couldn’t really see anything else beyond what I was doing then. I couldn’t see any room for growth. But that’s when you need a champion the most. Even though I was just in my apartment, there was an ecstatic feeling to dancing to her music. I’d never had a relationship with dance music in that way, or with the club, or whatever. I’ve never really had that free experience in my body. But just listening to her in my house, I got a little hint of that.”
Persistence, or better yet, survival—the most primally uplifting dance music of all time is built around it. Dancing is in some ways an admission of death, a defiance that acknowledges loss. This is why all good dance music also has an eschatological bent: This is the only night, dance like you will live forever, till the world ends, party’s over, out of time. Robyn’s music embraces this feeling but pulls along something deeper and darker with it. Maybe the end of the world can happen while you’re in the corner, watching him kiss her. Maybe you can’t dance the pain away. Maybe, instead, you can dance with it, or inside it. Robyn will be there with you.
