The music industry will never catch up with Robyn

Ask any young pop singer today who their biggest influence is and chances are they’ll have mentioned Robyn, with a starry-eyed reverence, before you’ve even finished the question. In music reviews, interviews and press releases, she is second only to Kate Bush as an aspirational point of comparison. “I have goose bumps thinking about it,” electro-pop singer Maggie Rogers – who was born the year Robyn first signed to a major label – told me last year while raving about the 2010 single “Dancing On My Own”. “Like, all over my body. Wow.” In 2018, everyone wants to sound like Robyn. Except, perhaps, Robyn.

Because try as we might, we’re never going to catch up with her. Every time the modern pop world moulds itself in Robyn’s image, she changes shape – often to the detriment of her mainstream and chart success. Indeed, the voice that launched a thousand chart-topping careers has never had a top 10 album in the UK, and has barely even charted in the US since 1997.

As a teenager in the Nineties, at a time when young female popstars were expected to be pliant, empty vessels for the men controlling them behind the scenes, Robyn refused to bend to her major label’s will. “I’m not going to be a product,” she told interviewers at the time. So songwriter Max Martin – who now says that every female artist who comes into his studio puts Robyn’s album on the table and says, “I wanna make this” – turned his focus to 15-year-old Britney Spears instead. She became a global superstar.

By the late Noughties, though, the wilful, defiant temperament, for which Robyn was essentially punished, was now in vogue. The world was better for female popstars (though far from perfect) and some of the biggest-selling albums of the year came from autonomous women exploring their loud, messy sides. In 2010, among the biggest singles from female solo artists were Rihanna’s “Only Girl in The World”, Katy Perry’s “California Gurls”, and Kesha’s “Tik Tok” – which was the most successful song of the year in the US.

But the three singles Robyn released in 2010, “Dancing On My Own”, “Hang With Me” and “Indestructible” – perfect pop songs with the silky, slippery dance-and-cry DNA that every popstar now tries to emulate – reached No 8, 54 and 171 respectively in the UK, and didn’t chart at all in the US. The same year, her album Body Talk peaked in the UK albums chart at No 168, and in the Billboard 200 at No 142.

But listen to the charts now and it’s clear which sound is the dominant one. Rihanna, Perry and Kesha are still creatively viable today – but the one-note, staccato punch of all three of those chart-topping 2010 songs (sing the choruses to yourself, and you’ll notice the pattern) is no longer part of the pop landscape. Body Talk, meanwhile, is now considered one of the seminal pop albums of the 21^st century. As a recent Guardian profile pointed out, you can hear its influence in the output of both huge popstars and emerging talents.

When Lorde was in the studio recording what would become her game-changing second album, 2017’s Melodrama, she wrote a blog post about the impression Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” had made on her. “This song, to me, is perfect,” she wrote. “It’s happy and sad, fiery and independent but vulnerable and small, joyous even when a heart is breaking. We put it on right there in the studio, and I was up out of my seat dancing with my eyes screwed shut […] and I could feel something hot and teary in the back of my throat just from FEELING so much at once. And I think it was then when I realised I’m going to be in love with music for the rest of my life.” Melodrama’s lead single, “Green Light” – which so defies pop conventions that Max Martin declared it “incorrect songwriting” – ended up being one of the best songs of the year.

And so, obviously, Robyn has moved on. Her new album Honey, which has been hugely anticipated by her fans ever since she teased the title track in an episode of HBO’s Girls last year, feels almost like an attempt to shrug off the weight of her own legacy. It is as much club music as pop, repeating one line until it becomes trance-like and hypnotic, more focussed on creating a mood than a narrative. “I was interested in songs that didn’t have a beginning and an end,” she told The Guardian. “I wasn’t interested in melody at all.”

Even in discarding such basic pop necessities as melody, though, Robyn has managed to create a masterpiece. As this publication’s review puts it, she has “delivered nine songs that glow and pulse with bittersweet sensuality”, sung in a voice “that sifts over the synths like icing sugar”. And just like Body Talk before it, it’s so far not bothered the charts.

Despite all the hype, the album’s first single, “Missing U”, charted at No 87 for a week, before promptly dropping off completely. “Honey”, which is probably the most accessible track on the album, and sounds most like Body Talk-era Robyn, didn’t chart at all. Perhaps, then, even if she had retraced her old steps, Robyn – who turns 40 next summer – wouldn’t have fared as well as the younger artists who are fashioning themselves after her.

“Missing U” only made it onto Radio 1’s B List, and “Honey” wasn’t playlisted at all. In the month since “Honey” was released, according to data from Radio Monitor, the station has only played the song 15 times across all its shows. Radio 1 has been criticised before for alleged ageism – Madonna called it out in 2015 for “discriminatory” playlist decisions, and a few months back, Sunday morning DJ Jordan North declared it “cringey” for over-40s to attempt to dance. When Robyn was younger, the mainstream world wasn’t quite ready. Now it seems, it would rather nurture younger facsimiles of her.

Still, it seems unlikely that Robyn particularly cares. Not because in a recent YouGov survey, only 33 per cent of people deemed Radio 1 “relevant”, but because she’s always been an artist who spoke the loudest to outsiders – hence her significant queer following. With Honey, that probably won’t change. Maybe in a decade’s time, the charts will be full of songs like Honey’s “Human Being” and “Beach2k20”.

By then, of course, Robyn will be onto something else entirely.