Eight Years and Then the Music Comes Back

Robyn is one of those artists who got stuck in my memory at a specific summer and never fully left. Dancing on My Own, With Every Heartbeat, Hang with Me—those songs from the Body Talk era hit something I don’t have a clean name for. Something about being in a crowd and feeling separate from it. Something about wanting what you can’t have and dancing anyway. The album came out in 2010 and felt like a document of that exact moment—a generation on the other side of the aughts, tired and hopeful in roughly equal measure.

Then she was gone. Eight years of nothing, or near enough. And then last October Honey arrived and it was like the silence had been deliberate all along—like she’d waited until she had something worth saying. Missing U and Human Being and Because It’s in the Music sounded like Robyn but older, steadier, less frantic and more certain. Critics loved it. Fans who’d been waiting loved it. Whatever she’d been doing in those eight years, it hadn’t blunted her.

Alongside the new single Send to Robin Immediately, she’s launched a clothing line called RBN, developed with stylist Naomi Itkes and the Swedish label Björn Borg. Sport and workwear and streetwear in a mix that makes sense if you’ve ever seen what Robyn actually wears—functional but designed, practical but considered. The collection draws on Björn Borg’s archive from the ’80s and on what Robyn and Itkes, who grew up in Sweden together, remember about Swedish style from childhood. It doesn’t feel like a celebrity merch play. It feels like someone who actually cares about clothes. Which, at this point, seems entirely consistent with everything else she does.