“Fuck an app, I need me some IRL,” Robyn purrs on the title track of her first album in seven years, Sexistential. The 46-year-old dance-pop high priestess chronicles life on “Raya while on IVF” and “scrolling [her] feed while breastfeeding,” a testimony that even the biological clock now runs on Wi-Fi.

For all of the track’s head-turning one-liners and stripped-back electro-house minimalism, the album ultimately gestures in the opposite direction: a study of an artist long defined by being ahead of the curve confronting the queasy possibility that maybe the curve has moved on without her. 

“Blow My Mind” resurrects a deep cut from 2002’s Don’t Stop the Music, sanding it down and rebuilding it with sleeker materials, while on “Sucker for Love,” she clings to semantics as self-defense: “I’m not a sucker, I’m a sucker for love.” Both are exercises in measuring the gap between the artist she once was and the one she’s sizing up now, which proves to be a delicate examination of time and relevance.

If Sexistential has a thesis, it’s that desire will make you see stars where there are only fluorescent lights. “Dopamine,” the album’s fired up lead single, finds Robyn conceding, “Maybe it’s just dopamine, but it feels so real to me,” before the album closes with the lustral “Into the Sun,” hammering home its central paradox: reflection can be ecstatic, and even self-awareness can make you dance.