Robyn

A friend of mine recently wrote on Facebook, “Robyn is such good going-out music that leaving the house may prove impossible.” That’s exactly right. Robyn makes dance music for people who don’t really go to dance clubs, disposable pop for cultish record collectors, teen pop by and for people who aren’t teenagers anymore.

In fact, Robyn started out as a preteen pop star, singing the theme song for a TV show in her native Sweden. As a teenager in the mid-’90s, Robyn had a couple of minor U.S. hits written and produced by some of the same people who later produced Britney Spears. After a few years of frustrating battles with her record company, she started her own label and reinvented herself as a grown-up electropop artist with the 2005 release Robyn, which gathered a cult following in the United States. Pitchfork started covering her extensively at that time, even though the album wasn’t released here until 2008. Lately Robyn’s been on a roll, becoming a big star in Britain, working with Snoop Dogg, and releasing two albums in the States this year. The first, Body Talk Pt. 1, was released here in June.

In the song “Fembot,” on the new album, Robyn sings a bunch of silly robot-sex puns before delivering the chorus: “I’ve got news for you/ Fembots have feelings, too.” Contrast this to Christina Aguilera’s recent Bionic, in which the pop star also portrays herself as a sex robot but fails to show any humanity. Robyn couldn’t be just another boring hit-making machine if she tried.