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Escape One | genius.com
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After lengthy deliberation, I’ve concluded that the feint at the core of Robyn’s latest album is entirely intentional.
Honey, released last October to critical acclaim, returns time and again to the motif of beaches, and I’m sure your mind is already blossoming with images of golden sands under crystal skies, of sun-drenched bodies working up a healthy sweat, of ice cream dripping down sticky hands and the smell of salt drying in your hair.
But someone who hails from Scandinavia may have a somewhat chillier perspective on the concept: an ever-shifting frontier between harsh, rocky landscapes and even harsher seas. Stylish peacoats and snug cable-knits to keep out the bitter cold of triangular grey water washing silently over square black stone.
Because you only ever need to crack out the honey to take the edge off a particularly bitter tea, or to enliven a slice of bad dry cake. Summer salts and winter sweets are two sides of the same coin, a coin that Robyn has decidedly flipped.
She keeps to her own schedule, of course, as stars of a certain calibre are wont to do. Robyn’s last studio album, 2010’s seminal Body Talk, remains a milestone of modern pop, a point for calibration as much as inspiration. It is a thing of elemental simplicity, constucted in strata of strobing synths cranked to maximum intensity. And it is against this mechanism that Robyn can express her greatest gift: undiluted empathy.
Her boundless capacity for feeling threads through advice on how to break up with a partner as kindly as possible, through assurances that present pain will be worth future growth, and through futuristic affirmations of feminism and femininity, all set to absolute club bangers. Naturally, the contrast is most extreme on Body Talk’s brutally specific standout track, which finds Robyn struggling to hold herself together while a bassline violently jackhammers an implacable semiquaver rhythm.
“I’m in the corner /
Watching you kiss her /
I’m right over here /
Why can’t you see me? / […] /
I keep dancing on my own”
Where Body Talk saw Robyn radiating her special Swedish sympathy outwards, eight years of trials and tribulations, of illnesses and losses and life, have shifted her perspective. Honey sees her focusing inwards, on taking care of herself.
Which means taking care of her ears. Honey begins by giving every knob a generous twist to the left, bringing every extreme down to a simmer. Though fluent in the aforementioned club banger, Robyn demonstrates proficiency in other textures, smoothing together nocturnal beats and low-key grooves not a million miles away from Mariah Carey’s aptly-titled Caution.
‘Between the Lines’ slinks past, ‘Baby Forgive Me’ stands out starkly, and ‘Because It’s In the Music’ sees Robyn wistfully slipping into the trappings on disco like an ex’s soft old shirt. The club switched off the speaker stacks hours ago — someone’s phone is doing its best to keep the party going as a shy sun peeks over the still grey sea.
The pneumatics of Body Talk shatter into a kaleidoscopic shimmer on album opener ‘Missing U’, where they interfere prettily with the harmonics like morning light on water.
“I’ve turned all my sorrow to glass /
It don’t leave no shadow /
There’s this empty space you left behind”
And although Robyn’s style has calmed down over the years, her emotional acuity has not dimmed. It may have begun to dry and crack at the edges a little — before she can shift into gear, she passive-aggressively snaps:
“If you’ve got something to say…”
But even that refrain modulates soon enough into a call for honesty. Honey curls the open palm of Body Talk into a beckoning finger at every turn, most comfortingly when the title track reprises a decades-old lyric:
“You’re not gonna get what you need /
But baby I have what you want /
Come get your honey”
It’s a miracle that after all this time, Robyn is still as warm and real as ever. She may have smoothed down her pummeling synths into silvery surfaces, but the compassion she showed for the man who spurned her on ‘Dancing On My Own’ has not dulled.
Honey finds respite from the ravages of time where it can. And where it can’t, it smears a little sweetness.