Photo by Marili Andre
In the eight years since Robyn’s last album, the clubby, downtempo Honey, Robyn froze her eggs, broke up with her long term partner, and had a baby via IVF at the age of 44. “I feel like the purpose of my life is to stay horny,” Robyn, now 46, said in January when announcing her latest record Sexistential. The album is, in many ways, a return to Robyn’s unforgettable Body Talk era. Throughout the 29 minutes of this no-skips return to form is a propulsive, fizzy desire, palpable and pulsating in glitchy synths and throbbing electronica. And 16 years after the release of her magnum opus, she still has a lot to say about the body.
For one, she is really horny — for the club, for a hot fit, for the beat, for Adam Driver, a dream “donor” who gives her a “boner,” as she rhymes on the titular track. While Sexistential is not explicitly about perimenopause, it is part of a moment where horny, defiant, a little cringe, and abundantly free post-parenthood art by women in their mid-40s has penetrated the mainstream.
Take Nicole Kidman’s character in the 2024 age gap S&M drama Baby Girl, or Sophie Ellis-Bextor, also 46, who, off the success of the "Murder on the Dancefloor" resurgence, released the exuberant disco pop album Perimenopop last year. Both works highlight a voracious desire for sex, and the confidence to say it. But no work of art has been more discussed in perimenopausal group chats than Miranda July’s 2024 novel All Fours, which follows a 45-year-old woman who embarks on a cross-country road trip only to end up in a nearby suburb, where she moves into a motel and has an erotic affair with a younger man. It’s outrageously and perversely horny; the kind of book that can infuse the erotic into a used tampon. If All Fours is the first great perimenopausal novel, Sexistential may just well be the first great perimenopausal pop album. (It’s certainly the only mainstream pop album about lactating.)
In these works, perimenopause isn’t the fall, the denouement of a second half of a life — it’s a cannonball shooting you higher. "Perimenopause is like a second adolescence,” Ellis-Bextor told the BBC about her record, which she says was made to “flip the script” around being middle-aged. “Only this time I've got wisdom, a little sass, and zero tolerance for nonsense.” Similarly, Sexistential is post birth, post bullshit Robyn, flying high in a world that stamps an expiration date on the erotic and creative life of women of a certain age.
Robyn is really horny — for the club, for a hot fit, for Adam Driver on 'Sexistential.'
In these works, perimenopause isn’t the fall, the denouement of a second half of a life — it’s a cannonball shooting you higher.
Robyn talks about pregnancy and motherhood as unlocking the big questions: “What is my identity as someone with children, and what is it without? It’s extremely existential,” she said.
But on Sexistential, the choice isn’t a binary. In fact, pregnancy is simply a gateway to new and stranger forms of hedonism. On “Sexistential,” she raps about the benefits of raw sex while pregnant: “Fuck a Plan B, baby, it's no big deal/ I'm already ten weeks in maternity.” For her, IVF and A/S/L are acronyms of equal importance.
It’s a different narrative than what we’ve heard on other recent pop records. On the brat track “I think about it all the time,” Charli xcx, then 31, considers whether or not to have kids. “Should I stop my birth control?/ Cause my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all,” she sings. The song is a marked sonic and tonal shift from the rest of the brat’s club-banging hedonism.
Robyn’s approach to motherhood is more akin to Britney Spears during her Blackout era, who, then just 27, felt she had to remind the world that, despite having a kid, she’s still on top of it. “Guess I can't see the harm in workin' and bein' a mama/ And with a kid on my arm, I'm still an exceptional earner,” she sings on “Piece of Me,” a similarly downtempo dance beat that features vocals by then 28-year-old Robyn, and written and produced by Klas Åhlund, who also produced Sexistential. “You want a piece of me” is a question, a statement, a threat. But standing firmly in one's own power at 27 is expected. After all, that’s when you’re at your “peak,”right?
Robyn is pushing back against that idea. “As a woman, it’s so hard to age gracefully and with integrity in a commercial pop industry,” Robyn has said of Sexistential. “Your vulnerability, your artistry is the most treasurable thing you have, and when you let that go it’s like you let go of yourself. When it feels like there’s something that’s not really OK to talk about, that’s the point when you’re in danger.”
Robyn isn’t in danger; she still has a lot to say. Partly because she’s open to seeing things in new ways. Because being horny isn’t just about sex, it’s about remaining open and porous. On the album, she revisits “Blow My Mind,” her own song from 24 years ago. She rewrites the lyrics to be about the duality of parenthood and sex to create a breathy, Kraftwerk-like lullaby about lactation that’s as sentimental as it is, well, titillating. “Baby, ravish me / Tear into my flesh / Button down my shirt / Go on, make a mess / Make it quick, I'm about to burst / We’re all skin on skin (Come here) / Ain’t you the cutest little thing?” she sings, not shying away from but prodding at the unexpected sensuality of motherhood.
In All Fours, July describes birth as being thrown energetically into the air. “We aged as we rose,” she writes. “At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half.” On Sexistential, Robyn remains suspended. She’s not falling; she’s still flying, ever-reaching toward something higher, something faster, something more honest and alive. On the album’s last track, the crying-at-the-club, space-age ballad “Into the Sun,” she sings: “Look what I've done/ So brave and dumb, fly right into the sun.” It’s a moment of austerity and reflection in the vein of Madonna's own 1998 post-birth album Ray of Light.
Sexistential doesn't so much as raise existential quandaries, but squashes the ones society puts on perimenopausal women. Yeah, Robyn’s horny; yeah, she’s on Raya; yeah, she’s obsessed with her kid. She is maternal, but free. For her, getting older isn’t about suppressing desires, or her career, it’s about getting everything you want. Real freedom, as it turns out, comes from sticking around. In a crucial moment on “Really Real,” she speaks-sings a conversation with a child, playing both parts: “Hey mom. What time is it where you are? / Don’t worry about it. You can call me any time. / Just make yourself a cup of tea and go to bed.” She is back at work; her son doesn't know what she’s doing; he doesn’t need to know. Her art is all her own.
But can you be free without being, well, cringe? She worried about it, telling Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker that she worried the title was a little “horny mom.” She was mocked after gyrating on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” when she performed “Sexistential” earlier this year. But what else is freer than rapping about blowing your pop star cash on Etsy? “I had to convince Klas to help me write, basically, this rap about IVF,” she told Tolentino. “He didn’t think it was a good idea, which I think is just bad taste of him.” This shameless exuberance extends to the album cover, where Robyn is topless and screaming, not quite in ecstasy but in giddiness. She looks a little cringe, a little uncool. But she’s not pretending to be anything. She’s reached an age where she no longer has to. That freedom is something we can all look forward to.
