Resplendent in a tight white frock and not-quite-indecent white skirt while onstage at New York’s Highline Ballroom on a brisk February night, Robyn is back in NYC for the first time in 10 years. The last time, she was 18 and sporting an R&B-tinged pop smash called “Show Me Love,” a perfect slice of Max Martin–produced sizzle. But tonight, performing her new self-titled album—her first stateside release since the last trip—she’s all grown up, with confidence no teenager could summon.
So don’t call her a teen-pop casualty. “The story of me being this victim of the pop industry is, to me, a little simple,” she says a week later from her native Sweden. “It’s easy to make that kind of assumption, now that there’s so much talk about people like Britney Spears. But I was always critical, and that always led me to different decisions than other people in my situation.”
And Robyn Carlsson, 28, has made some risky choices. After two subsequent albums failed to receive U.S. release, Robyn bought out her contract from Jive and started her own label, Konichiwa, named after her spunky 2005 dance-rap hit “Konichiwa Bitches.” Released in different iterations since that year, the full-length Robyn (Konichiwa/Cherrytree/Interscope) is adventurous and hilarious—part kinetic, thanks to Swedish producers Klas Ahlund and the Knife, and part soaring on hyper-ballads like “Be Mine!” and “With Every Heartbeat.” Robyn’s rep as a writer and remixer is growing, too—she co-wrote Spears’ 2008 hit “Piece of Me” (that’s her on backing vocals) and remixed her rap hero Snoop Dogg’s “Sexual Eruption” this year.
Back in New York, after an evening of frenetic cooing and some brief forays into MCing, Robyn winds down with a familiar encore: an electro-acoustic rendition of “Show Me Love.” She sings it more slowly and with more tension than in the original, but the meaning remains the same. Later, she summed it up: “Whatever changes my career has been through, a good melody is always a good melody. And it always makes sense.”
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