Robyn
Swedish has-been self-finances her comeback album and winds up making one of the year's finest, smartest, and most engaging pop records.
The last thing you might expect of a late-'90s Swedish pop singer ("Show Me Love") re-emerging in the U.S. from her Swedish cocoon would be a sharp Euro-R&B album of two-year-old material baited with a recent British hit. But if that description sounds gimmicky, the music doesn't—whether matter-of-factly giving some…
"I present to you/Unleashed in the East/Best dressed in the West/Sorted in the North/Without a doubt in the South/the queen of queen bees," intones the booming voice on Robyn's opening track, "Curriculum Vitae."
Robyn is definitely a slow-burner, but it’s also everything pop music should be: provocative, poignant, inventive, and fun.