Robyn: 'Robyn'

The electronica world seems to be swamped with small bossy female vocalists telling everyone what’s what. However, that’s just because the downloading phenomenon has opened up the market to women who don’t want to fit the unreconstructed ‘love my lady lumps’ mould. Since her ‘Show Me Love’ days, Robyn has deliberately made a move away from the mainstream and now releases records under her own label, Konichawa. It’s a wise decision. A track like ‘Handle Me’ would have been polished up by a big label in order to produce a typically smooth R&B hit. But Robyn knows best – by following her own path, she’s actually making extremely accessible pop. And that’s where the injustice and the irony is – apparently her old record label thought ‘Who’s That Girl’ was too weird to be mainstream, which is just plain wrong.

‘With Every Heartbeat’ is a potential ballad. A rock band could cover ‘Be Mine!’. The fact that you can imagine these tracks in different context shows that Robyn is an excellent songwriter, and surely it won’t be long before the executives are knocking on her door again. Even if she and her ilk never sign up, there will always be record companies, because not everyone likes music enough to search for it. But for the rest of us, there’s always bloody MySpace.

Released 2nd April 2007 by Konichiwa Records.

Written by Lucy Nordberg.