Comeback of pop star Robyn: tight dance with himself

The work of Robyn's well-known Swedish pop artist Robin Miriam Carlsson can now be divided into three phases with the release of her album "Honey". First of all, there was the rather foreign-determined first phase in which she recorded sweet R & B pop under the direction of producer Max Martin, which was released in 1995 as "Robyn Is Here" and was very successful in the USA - and thus partly responsible for the fact that the US Label Jive signed a young woman named Britney Spears shortly thereafter and put just that Max Martin at her side. "... Baby One More Time", Britney's hit album from 1999, it sounds like the younger sister of "Robyn Is Here". So if Robyn had never been there, there was a possibility that Spears, the interpreter - not the woman - would never have existed.

Robyn entered her selfish second phase when she founded her own label, Konichiwa Records, in 2005, to work with Swedish artists such as The Knife or Klas Åhlund to create catchy, refrained, danceable electropop. "Robyn" was the name of their self-titled rebirth album published that same year. Five more years later, that appeared as two EPs and a LP casually published "Body Talk". Robyn does not like rigid deadlines. It's not for her to work with fear. In the late summer she invites to the interviews in Berlin, without her new album being finished mastered.

DISPLAY

Buy MP3 | Buy CD | Buy LP

at

Buy MP3

at

The 39-year-old can not be put under pressure, she simply has no one to prove anything. The narrative of her two early albums was a "Crash And Burn Girl" existence, she says: It was about always standing on the wrong guy. Either because he's a loser ("Bum Like You", "Handle Me") because he just does not like it ("With Every Heartbeat") or because he's forgiven elsewhere ("Be Mine!", "Call Your Girlfriend" , "Dancing On My Own"). "You're a selfish, narcissistic, psycho freaking, bootlicking Nazi creep," she sings scornfully at her love interest in 2005 in "Handle Me". In the interview we prefer to ask again: "So" Nazi creep ", that was just a stylistic device, right?" Was it. Clear.

photo gallery

6 pictures

To be interested in such types permanently, that must be self-induced! Others would be carried away by gentle guitars as a result of this slightly depressing realization or accompanied by piano strumming to go to bed crying. But Robyn, the melancholy-skeptic, hears Armand Van Helden's tough house when she's down, because she does not want to support bad-doing with sad music.

Her sufferings of love and herself underpin her, on the contrary, with beats stimulating physical activity and melodic excitement curves that give the listener a sense of grandiosity and heroism, while gripping lines like these: "And I'm all messed up 'I'm so out of line, yeah.' So the perfect soundtrack for the "I'm a self-hurting ego-pig, but oh, hurt me!" - attitude that Lena Dunham adequately portrayed in "Girls". Robyn's "Dancing On My Own" was not only part of a now iconic bedroom dance scene in the TV series, but also a kind of anthem for Generation Twitter.

For the last season of "Girls" Dunham wanted 2017 again a song by Robyn, but she had no new material. She was deeply involved in a life crisis and depression. The confrontation with a childhood as a daughter of constantly absent actors, a youth as a pop singer as well as the early death of her friend and longtime producer Christian Falk put her to. Then there was the separation from her life partner. Robyn went into a long therapy - and sometime for the first time all alone in the studio. She made music only for herself to get herself out of the feeling of paralysis and paralysis in the studio. Crises are often transitional phases that lead to new creative phases.

This third phase could be called a gentle self-knowledge disco. "Honey" is the name of the song she eventually sent to Dunham. And that's the name of the album, which Robyn now produced herself and with friends like Åhlund, Adam Bainbridge (Kindness), Joseph Mount (Metronomy), Mr. Tophat and Zhala. It's an apt name, because "Honey" is musically as tough as sweet. The former "Fembot" read Yuval Noah Harari's "A Brief History of Humanity" and then wrote "Human Being," a dreamy pop song dripping from the spoon about what it means to be human. The quiet music underscores her transformation from the driven ego machine to the well-to-do adult. With a few exceptions, there are no anthems that are strictly aligned with the chorus, but beats that meander lazily like life.

Robyn's lyrical I learned that the love stories caused by "Daddy Issues" are never heroic. Like her music, she says, she herself has become much softer. The rest is licking wounds: "It's never gonna be broken hearted ever again," says Ever Again, the most intriguing of the nine songs. And in "Baby Forgive Me", which she sees as a disco version of Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia," she asks her finally worthy counterpart for forgiveness. Somewhere below the beat you can hear whistles and cheers: The dance floor from Robyn's past, he is still there, but it is already early morning and the sun is shining. The drama of the night is over for the time being.