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Robyn
Honey
Warner
When it comes to the pop music we will remember 2018 by, the most enduring will probably be a fictional one: A Star is Born, the weepy Oscar front-runner that, for all its many charms, has a fairly dim opinion of pop.
If you've heard this one before, the film seems to say, with its assumed-to-be familiar story of Lady Gaga's Ally, a young artist who leaves the authentic songwriting and heartfelt work of her early days behind for costumes, dance routines and soulless hits.
It's supposed to be the story we're supposed to be about pop music, how it's the kind that makes you famous, but perhaps not the same kind of fulfilled.
And then, there's Robyn's Honey, the best pop album of 2018, which proves that there are so many wonders of the genre that the movie does not care to tell.
Pop is supposed to be a kind that belongs to brightest young things; Robyn is 39 years old, and then crossed the pond to become a beloved critical favorite in the states. And she's now making some of the best music of her career.
Pop stars are expected to be operating in a machine of releasing new hits; Robyn took eight years to make Honey, following up her beloved 2010 album Body Talk by stepping away from music for nearly a decade.
Far from soulless pop bangers, some of the most popular hits – especially her breakthrough hit Dancing On My Own – are queer dance floor anthems. Her wrenching one-woman dance sequence in the her Call Your Girlfriend music video is the perfect antidote to the kind of stilted, overly-rehearsed routines Lady Gaga's character attempts in the movie.
And beyond that, Honey Does not sound like the album of a pop star interested in stuffing their release with the maximum-possible number of hits. Honey is the slowest album of Robyn's career, its nine laser-focused tracks from their music club rather than radio pop, characterized by stripped-down grooves that leisurely unfold over the course of the songs – sometimes building into an evocative climax, sometimes leaving the listener waiting for a big moment that Robyn chooses to never materialize.
Honey may be a danceable album, but its overwhelming emotion is angst, from the glittering sadness of its lead single Missing U to the chorus of Because It's In The Music that sums up the album's mission statement, "Because it's in the music / Yeah, we're dancing to it." And considering how lean Honey is, with a single production flourished out of place, its unrestrained moments are that much more impactful, like when its brilliant closing track Ever Again explodes into a euphoria of synths in the album's final moments.
That's also why some listeners, who can be expecting the tracklist of Honey to be as well as some other albums, might be disappointed by the more leisurely pace and the less-populous hooks. But, when you remember that Robyn – like our Star Is Born protagonist Ally – got her start a heavily-built young pop star, it's clear that Honey is the kind of album she 's strived her whole life to be able to release, an honest manifestation of her artistry that' s uniquely and purely hers. – USA Today / Tribune News Service
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