Honey

Eight years passed between Body Talk and Honey, which Robyn released on 26 October 2018 on her own label, Konichiwa, licensed to Island in Europe and Interscope in the US. In 2014 Christian Falk, a close friend and collaborator, died of pancreatic cancer, and she went through a two-year split from her long-term partner, all while in psychoanalysis. “Between 2014 and 2016, I was just like, extremely sad,” she told the Guardian. What came out meanwhile were collaborations, among them Do It Again with Röyksopp, an EP with Falk and Markus Jägerstedt as La Bagatelle Magique, and songs with Kindness, Metronomy and Mr. Tophat, several of whom stayed on for this record.

She started alone. “Missing U”, the oldest song, began in the summer of 2014 as a laptop demo on a LinnDrum and a software synth, and its lyrics took two more years, she told Pitchfork. She spent a year by herself in the Stockholm studio she shares with Klas Åhlund, learning to produce, and has traced her urge to make music again to a night in a Los Angeles club, hearing DJ Koze’s “XTC”. Joseph Mount of Metronomy produced six of the nine songs, Åhlund, her collaborator since 2005, produced four, and she co-produced three; the Swedish producer Mr. Tophat and Kindness, the British producer Adam Bainbridge, made the other two. Her openness left Mount feeling exposed at first, he told the Guardian, “like we were in secondary school doing drama”.

The title song took longest. Lena Dunham picked an unfinished version from demos Robyn sent her for the final season of HBO’s Girls in 2017. Robyn wasn’t happy with it, fans ran a hashtag campaign for its release, and in May 2018 she played the finished song at a Robyn-themed night at Brooklyn Bowl. Written with Åhlund and Jägerstedt and mixed in Paris by Philippe Zdar of Cassius, it went through more than 20 versions, Dazed reported. “Missing U” came out first, on 1 August 2018, then “Honey” on 26 September. Announcing the album, she called it “a very soft ecstasy”.

“Human Being”, with Zhala on additional vocals, drew on Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. “Because It’s in the Music” is about a song that stays tied to a person after the relationship ends, and Åhlund recorded a flamenco solo for it that they all agreed to drop. Mr. Tophat gave “Baby Forgive Me” its drum programming and what the sleeve calls a “sad robot voice”. “Send to Robin Immediately” is named after the file Kindness sent her, samples Lil Louis’s 1989 house hit “French Kiss” and has Sampha on bass synth. She and Åhlund freestyled “Between the Lines” over a 1990s house rhythm: “Sometimes you imitate stuff until you make something of your own,” she told Pitchfork. “Ever Again”, the closer, she wrote with Mount at the very end, as a break from “Honey”.

Critics were close to unanimous. Alexis Petridis gave it five stars in the Guardian, warning that anyone waiting for another “Dancing on My Own” would be let down, since the sadness is built into the sound, but calling it perfect as one artist’s personal vision. Pitchfork named it Best New Music in Stacey Anderson’s review, Will Hermes in Rolling Stone likened its flow to a good DJ set, and AllMusic’s Heather Phares called it “more of a metamorphosis than a comeback”. The doubts were about hooks: Robert Christgau, in Vice, missed the hooks of the Body Talk years, and Drowned in Sound found it likeable but short of her best, with a weak middle stretch. It reached No. 1 in Sweden, No. 21 in the UK and No. 40 in the US, where it topped Billboard’s dance/electronic albums chart, and came second on the Guardian’s albums of the year and fourth on Pitchfork’s.

Take Honey apart and most of the pieces are stock: a house kick, a disco shuffle, a 1990s piano-house pastiche, a sample of one of the best-known house records, a beach song built from party small talk. That kit is common property in dance-pop. What puts this record near the top of 2018 is the woman working it: a voice Pitchfork called anti-histrionic, songs that let sadness and pleasure share the same four minutes without forcing either to win, and a producer’s judgement that kept one song open for years and cut whatever did not earn its place. The sleeve keeps the evidence: Klas Åhlund is credited with a “deleted flamenco solo”.