Never Stops Moving

Watch any Robyn performance closely enough and you’ll notice she almost never stops moving—through the songs about heartbreak, through the ones about longing, through the ones where the situation is clearly unrecoverable. She dances because it’s all she’s got left. That’s the thesis of her entire catalog, and in 2010 she built it into Body Talk, three EPs released across the year that amounted to the strongest pop statement anyone had made in a long time.

Dancing on My Own is the obvious centerpiece—the figure on the edge of the dancefloor watching the person she loves hold someone else, unable to leave, just moving through it. Most pop songwriting about heartbreak wants to resolve the feeling, soften the landing. Robyn points a light directly at it and turns the tempo up. You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway.

She’d earned the right to make music this uncompromising. In the late 90s she was a Swedish teen act briefly massive internationally on the strength of Show Me Love, then dropped by her major label when the profile dipped. She started her own, Konichiwa Records, and spent a decade building toward exactly this. The vindication of Body Talk was total and completely deserved.

Robyn played Hamburg in March 2011, a small intimate show—which suited the music better than any arena would have. I missed it. Some gaps you just have to live with.