Robyn, the persevering pop star

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Do you remember that cotton-swab-haired singer with the little girl voice who once implored us all if she was really wanted? Let this blast from the 90’s past remind you:

Well, the reception Stateside may have been hot enough then, but it’s literally steaming now. Robyn is back. She’s so back that she’s coming out with three, I repeat three, new albums this year. Wowee. Someone’s really been working hard. There was a great, and adoring, article on Robyn by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker recently, and a new interview on the Creator’s Project yesterday. She’s everywhere, and she’s phenomenal. Talk about pushing through, persevering in a very real sense. And the Robyn we see now, the idiosyncratic fembot, has a much more mature and original sound than in her young days when she appeared classically engineered like the typical teen pop stars that dominate the airwaves. In fact, her current sound is quite daring. As Frere-Jones remarked, it is unusually versatile. She mixes all kinds of sounds, meaning that every single song coming out of her Konichiwa Records label is more surprising than the one before it. She’s also a refreshing pop star who plays down the sex appeal and spins complicated lyrics about expectation and love– that repeatedly bridge into the robotic…literally. I’m smitten. I bet you will be to.

Here is one of her new songs I can’t get out of my head:

Oh, and did I mentioned she’s Swedish? That obviously makes this Swede love her even more.

- Astri