“I really felt like I was crashing into myself again,” Robyn tells Apple Music about the making of her ninth full-length album. “I wanted the album to feel like it was hitting with a hard impact.” Given the transformation Sweden’s patron saint of dance pop has undergone since the release of her previous album, 2018’s Honey, it’s easy to see why. While weathering the pandemic at home in Stockholm after years of relentless, globe-lapping touring, Robyn decided to use this forced bout of downtime to work on new music and try to start a family—at the same time. “I wasn’t able to travel, and everything that I was expecting to do, I couldn’t,” she explains. “I decided to have a baby and make an album, and then I had the baby and I couldn’t make [the album].” The songs she and long-time collaborator Klas Åhlund had been working on were shelved as she navigated new motherhood. When she returned to the studio, the time away had given her a fresh perspective, eager ears and a voracious appetite for experimentation. “I had to go back and open everything up again after a few years, and it’s been a really amazing, chill time for me,” she says. “I came back to music in this really inspired way.” Sexistential, then, is exactly what you’d expect from the woman who perfected the art of the dance floor confessional at this point in her life. If her career-defining single “Dancing on My Own” is the inner monologue of a woman longing after an unrequited love, “Sucker for Love” has Robyn leaving that corner, storming the DJ booth and grabbing the mic to speak her truth: “You think I’m soft/Like that’s a flaw somehow... I’m not that tough, who wants to be that way?” The rest of Sexistential’s songs are as exuberant, love-struck and cathartic as ever, but there’s a frankness to the lyrics—and a filter-free raunchiness. She embraces her horniness throughout: “Talk to Me” dips into phone sex, and the title track playfully riffs on the conversation she had with a fertility doctor about her ideal sperm donor; both tracks delve beneath the sexy surface by drawing in thoughts on loneliness, desire and connection. But love remains her forever muse, and “Dopamine” speaks to its dizzying side effects. “It’s funny how, like, we want to feel in control, but we’re really just like blobs on a rock that’s spinning around in space, and the illusion of control is so fragile,” she says. “We’re also in this society now where dopamine is in every part of our daily lives, right? But [‘Dopamine’] also talks about how we’re afraid of that now, which we shouldn’t be—we shouldn’t be afraid of love.”