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Robyn knows where she's going – more than me, at least. It's a cloudy day in London and we're in front of a convenience store, both looking at our phones, trying to navigate to the National Gallery. I keep turning, trying to point to the intersection of the streets. "I think we're going in that direction!" She said quickly pointing a road. She goes in that direction, her backpack – half-open, her contents visibly jostling – swaying behind her.
The singer, 39, is disarming and unpretentious. Her platinum blonde hair is cut courteously. It is almost without makeup and a Jean Paul Gaultier camouflage print jacket. While I am in Leicester Square, crowded with tourists, no one stops or takes a double hold.
But if Robyn does not move around the world like a pop star, it's also true that she's not like most of them. She is a singer, songwriter and producer who has spent the last two decades being discreet. His last album, 2010 Body language, over the next decade: from "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen to Taylor Swift 1989 you can hear Robyn's influence – brilliant synths, perfectly symmetrical choruses and more than a hint of melancholy. When Lorde played on Saturday Night Live Last year, she did it with a framed photo of Robyn over the piano. Earlier this year, NPR called it "the oracle of 21st century pop".
Body language, which gave birth to the cult singles "Dancing on My Own" and "Call Your Girlfriend", marked the greatest moment for the artist, born Robin Miriam Carlsson, who worked regularly since the mid-90s: with a Top 10 pair in the United States, then as a star of independent dance through the 2000s via the label that she founded, Konichiwa Records, in collaboration with electropop experimenters like Knife and Röyksopp. But after the worldwide success of Body language, which earned him two Grammy nominations and legions of new fans, instead of capitalizing on all that momentum, Robyn went dark. "I needed to take a leave when I made that music and I did it because I was in a crisis of life," she said at lunch at a tapas restaurant in Soho. She was depressed after a break with her long-time boyfriend Max Vitali. (They have since gathered.) She also regretted the death of her close friend and collaborator Christian Falk, who had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2014 and who died a few months later. "I was very raw," she says.
She had never been depressed before – not like that. "I think I had it coming," she says. "He was waiting in the shade. I would always go out of my anxiety. But when I was in this depression, it did not work. And all these other things that I had to face also came: childhood, relationships, [anticipating] 40 years. All at the same time. She worked on a few collaborations and side projects, but she felt stuck. "I felt I did not want to make music," she says. "I could not get out of it."
She started to receive treatment several times a week. And she gave herself time to feel everything. She began to find a furrow in the physiognomy of the music she was doing, in the same way that the rhythms rocked her body. "The only way to make music was to start making me feel better," she says. His new music was not as clean and mathematical as the clean pop songs that brought him such a dedicated audience. These songs seemed different to him: more personal and more visceral. "It's all about pleasure," she says.
It takes a few listeners to start understanding the album that Robyn eventually wrote, who's calling Honey. But once it's up, it's as satisfying as anything it's ever published. The first single, "Missing U", serves as connective tissue between the last era and this news: it is sparkling, half-euphoric and half-elegiac. But nothing else on the album has that familiar texture – let alone the title track, which could be Robyn's masterpiece. It is stratified and psychedelic, like a Balearic dance party – more tactile than sonic. "I spent more time on this song than on any other music of my life," she says. "Do you know when you have these experiences that change fundamentally, or spiritually, almost? I wanted to make sure the song explained that. I wanted it to be more than just mood. I wanted it to be a physical feeling. "
What kind of feeling? She sighs. "When you make big changes," she says slowly, "when people die or you break up with someone, it does not matter – it destabilizes you in this intense way." "It was not a question of returning to a normal life," she says. "I do not think I can get back to the safety I've felt before – that's it. I am so much more aware of the instability of the world. Even the things we take for granted … "She squeezes the edge of the counter with her hands and shakes her for a second, as if trying to lift her off the ground. The only things that seemed really strong were her relationships – with other people, with her music, with herself.
Maybe that's why Honey feels so different: because there is nothing simpler than a broken heart. What she's struggling with now is more existential than that. In Robyn's old songs, the images of wounds are extremely external: she makes the dance floor a battleground for the heart, spinning alone in a disco in "Dancing on My Own" or, as in her best song, "Be mine! "She staged a scene of anxiety in a train station, where she watched an ex bend down to tie the laces of her new girlfriend. Honey, she reaches out into the dark, trying to create a connection, in atmospheric songs full of white spaces, instead of glittering synths. His words are plaintive and simple, like: "Come and get your honey." Or, "Baby, forgive me." Or: "Do not let me down. "
The latter comes from a song called "Human Being". On the chorus, she sings again and again "I am a human being". The song never ends with a triumphant chorus. But it's beautiful and sad, even if it does not sound like before. "The idea of going to the choir was not as interesting to me," she says. Writing these songs was another type of drug. "It was like stumbling over sadness."
Once we finally arrive at the National Gallery, Robyn wants to find paintings by Caravaggio, the Italian Baroque painter. Her work, she says, is so sensual: "All those naked women who think of God". She loves the hedonism of these paintings, the way they celebrate the pleasure.
But we end up passing several nudes with rounded belly to stop before a painting of Caravaggio called Boy bitten by a lizard. The subject is a young man, his shoulder exposed, his hands twisted like claws. The expression on his face is exquisite – some agony (of the titular lizard bite, presumably), but also a supernatural and possessed feeling. We have been watching it for a long time. "That's the one I wanted to see," she says.
She listens to the audio guide, her eyes widening as she reacts to the narration. "Listen to that," she said, putting the headphones on my ears. An art historian explains that the painting is generally perceived as an allegory for the five senses: it is about experimenting all– even the pain.
It's like the sounds she pursues. These glimmers of feeling, all that – joy and sadness, dancing and crying, up and comedown. And here we are, all these centuries later, still trying to figure out the best way to express that thought: how good everything is and how bad it can be when you're a vulnerable human being . When you have to stay both in the light and in the dark.
Caravaggio was a pioneer of this technique; he called it chiaroscuro. It is on Robyn's face that she studies painting. "You know, at the end of the day," she says, "we are just human beings who will die." Then she covers her face with her hands and laughs.
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