Robyn, on Her Own | The New Yorker

The Swedish pop star Robyn has been recording music since the 90s, but she’s best known for “Dancing on My Own,” a 2010 hit with a never-ending half-life—a generational floor-filler on the level of “I Will Survive” or “Don’t Stop Believin’.” (You know it: I’m in the corner/ Watchin’ you kiss her, oh-oh-oh!) “Her voice, tensile and clear, is an ideal delivery system for longing,” Jia Tolentino writes. “It makes me picture melted sugar hardening on ice.” You don’t need to compress it, or shape it,” Svein Berge, a longtime collaborator of Robyn’s and one half of the electronic duo Röyksopp, told Tolentino. “It seems fragile, but it’s punchy—when she says a word, it somehow goes straight through the speaker and pulls at your heart.” This month, Robyn is back with her ninth studio album, “Sexistential.” She’s now 46, a single mother after going through I.V.F.—an experience she raps about on the title track. Throughout her career, the dominant theme is that “love is the only devastation we choose freely, and she is greedy for it, because that’s what it means to be alive,” Tolentino writes. Read her Profile of the cult icon: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/30/robyn-profile](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/30/robyn-profile)