Robyn - Honey

The legend says that back in the late 90s when Robyn refused to sign a contract with a major label, their producers found a new girl to give her the career that was intended for the Swedish pop star (the songs, the looks, the marketing...) and that girl was Britney Spears. Pretty much that story sums up the development of modern pop music: on one side the manufactured teen pop comprised of disposable pretty faces that follow orders of their producers to cause an impact in the charts, and on the other side, the daring artists that challenge the industry by experimenting and offering new alternatives to what's proving to be commercially successful.

Jump to 20 years later and we can hear Robyn's influence everywhere in pop music. If you listen to a record by Rihanna, Carly Rae Jepsen, Ariana Grande or Britney Spears herself, just to mention a few, there's no denial that they take quite a lot from the club sound that Robyn crafted at the margin of the mainstream producers by collaborating with some of the most avant-garde musicians of the time, like The Knife or Røyksopp, and by drawing inspiration from the style of darker popstars, like Kate Bush. There might be no other musician that have mastered to perfection the concept of taking your deepest pains to the dancefloor in a cathartic ritual of body shaking.

Honey, the second single of her new album with the same name, is another piece of Robyn's cult story. Teased more than a year ago as the credits song of an episode of Girls, it opened the possibilities of a new Robyn album that was long due since her latest solo album was released in 2010. After much speculation, the final version of Honey was notably different to the one on the TV show, less explosive and more suggestive, charged with a sexual electricity that we had never heard on any of her songs.

Robyn is assertive and commanding: "Come get your honey", she demands after stating that "You're not gonna get what you need, but I have what you want". Her voice is at the front of the track, but the space created by the synths is able to give so much depth and air to her lust whispers. It's not explosive in the usual way bangers are, but the tension of the arousal keeps building in a perpetual tease, an open invitation for mutual pleasure with evocative and arousing images of "some kind of flower stuck in glitter, strands of saliva".

Robyn is back at the top of the pop game, again blending the borders between experimentation and pop hedonism, maybe the only pop diva right now who has never disappointed, that is able to offer an entirely Robyn-esque track but that also brings new tricks and surprises to a game where she has set most of the rules.