Review Summary: Robyn at her most whelming
The problem with waiting 8 years for a 9 song album is that it puts every individual track under a microscope – with basically a 1-song-per-year hit rate, you start thinking “did it really take a year to write each of these songs?” Unfortunately for
Sexistential, the answer to that question is “definitely not”. While it’s an objectively fun and well-written synthpop album, it carries the extra weight of being a Robyn album; one we’ve waited so long for. And whether the wait was worth it depends on your tolerance for filler in such a short (29 minute!!) project.
I’m puzzled at the inclusion of “Blow My Mind”, a misguided re-work of her own track from 2002. Worse, the title track is excruciatingly corny and grating, and not in a musically satisfying way like “Don’t ***ing Tell Me What To Do” from
Body Talk. It’s unfortunate they waste a quarter of the album, because there is also fantastic material on here. “Talk To Me” is a bouncy dance-pop masterpiece as amazing as her biggest hits, “Into The Sun” is a magnificent closer, and throbbing lead single “Dopamine” is euphoric in exactly the way that we need music to be in 2026.
And the remaining third of the album is… perfectly good. Songs like “Sucker For Love” and “Light Up” are well-composed, polished and immaculately produced – in fact, they’d likely be career highlights for Scandi-synthpop clones like Dagny, Sigrid or MØ. But they just lack a certain oomph – the indescribable special formula that separates your average top 40 pop track from “Dancing On My Own”. This is Robyn we’re talking about, she carries such a legendary mythos that her output just being good is almost more disappointing than being terrible.
Make no mistake,
Sexistential is still a very strong album, even if it doesn’t stack up to
Body Talk or
Honey – it’s just a victim of high standards and a starving fanbase.
