What does it mean to be 'sexistential'? For Swedish pop icon Robyn, the title of her newly announced ninth album, out 27 March, started off as a joke, with its personal significance only becoming apparent much later. As she explains in a press release:

“Exploring my sensual life is the same feeling as when I make a good song. It’s such a beautiful kind of sensitive vibration that takes so much work to keep afloat. I feel like the purpose of my life is to stay horny – it doesn’t even have to be about sex, but it’s feeling sensual and attracted to things that I enjoy, and not letting anything take over that.”

Having set dancefloors alight with the November release of comeback single "Dopamine", Robyn has shared two new tracks from Sexistential today alongside the album announcement. Listen to the title track and "Talk to Me" – both recently premiered at her ecstatic Brooklyn shows last week – below:

Sexistential was largely co-produced by Robyn and her longtime collaborator Klas Åhlund, with additional production by Oscar Holter on "Talk to Me", which is also notable for being Robyn's first co-write with Swedish pop mastermind Max Martin since 2010's "Time Machine". “I wrote it during the pandemic when there was no way to be physical,” she says. “I like talkers, that turns me on.”

In terms of sound, Sexistential is a pure pop rush that loops back around from the clubbier style of 2019's Honey, designed to feel “like a spaceship coming through the atmosphere at a really high speed and crash landing.” “That’s how I felt," adds Robyn. "Like I’d had all these experiences searching too far out into space, and now I’m crashing back into myself.”

The Sexistential rollout also includes a dedicated Instagram account @sexistential.xyz that functions as a digital moodboard for the record, currently including references to Prince, Kate Bush, high fashion, space travel, and films by Jonathan Glazer and Benny Chan. Follow along here.

Sexistential is out 27 March via Young Records. Pre-order here. Tracklist below:

1. Really Real
2. Dopamine
3. Blow My Mind
4. Sucker For Love
5. It Don't Mean A Thing
6. Talk To Me
7. Sexistential
8. Light Up
9. Into The Sun

Side note: It seems like "Blow My Mind" might well be a reworking of a track from Robyn's 2002 album Don't Stop the Music, if the new arrangement she's recently been performing live is anything to go by.