But when I was in this depression, that didn’t work. I would always work my way out of anxiety. She had never been depressed before-not like that. (They have since reunited.) She was also grieving the death of her close friend and collaborator Christian Falk, who was -diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2014 and died several months later. She was depressed after going through a breakup with her longtime boyfriend Max Vitali. “I needed to take time off when I made this music, and I did-because I was in a life crisis,” she says now over lunch at a tapas restaurant in Soho. But after the global success of Body Talk, which earned her two Grammy nominations and legions of new fans, instead of capitalizing on all that momentum, Robyn went dark. Earlier this year NPR called her “the 21st century’s pop oracle.”īody Talk, which spawned the cult singles “Dancing on My Own” and “Call Your Girlfriend,” marked the biggest moment yet for the artist, born Robin Miriam Carlsson, who had been working steadily since the mid-’90s: first as a teen pop sensation with a pair of Top 10 hits in the U.S., and then as an indie dance star releasing music through the ’00s via the label she founded, Konichiwa Records, collaborating with electropop experimentalists like the Knife and Röyksopp.

When Lorde performed on Saturday Night Live last year, she did so with a framed photo of Robyn above the piano. Her last album, 2010’s Body Talk, served as a blueprint for the sound of mainstream music in the decade that followed: from Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” to Taylor Swift’s 1989, you can hear Robyn’s influence-bright synths, perfectly symmetrical choruses and more than a whiff of melancholy. She’s a singer, songwriter and producer who has spent the past two decades being quietly peerless. But if Robyn does not move through the world like a pop star, it’s also true that she is not like most of them.

Robyn dancing on my own album video