I’m a little too young to grasp the scope of Robyn’s influence on today’s happy-but-sad pop scene. The Swedish artist’s last album came out in 2010, when I wasn’t having cathartic mid-club breakdowns as much as I was attending well-lit, emotionally-stunted bar mitzvahs. There’s definitely been an evolution in dance music since then: the Max Martin sound once had a monopoly over club playlists, but today’s dance floor soundtracks are both weirder and sadder, so often affecting an upbeat melancholia that Camila Cabello literally has a song called “Crying In The Club.” Robyn is a torchbearer of this genre, having set the stage for the Icona Pops and Carly Rae Jepsens of today — Lorde even performed on Saturday Night Live with a picture of Robyn propped on the piano. On Honey, Robyn returns to the forefront of euphoric, devastating pop with a softness that only makes it more powerful.

There’s a method to Robyn’s sadness — her manifold illustrations of mourning, heartbreak, and resilience celebrate tears as a necessary part of recovery. The album opener, “Missing U,” is steely and glittery, a pulsing dance track about the tragedy of loss. (Robyn has said it’s about the death of her longtime friend and collaborator, Christian Falk.) It’s a colorful blur of grief and reckoning, perhaps the most classically “Robyn” song on Honey. The rest of the album is a little more hopeful. “Because It’s In The Music” cushions romantic pining in disco uplift, finding empowerment in the inevitable wallowing that occurs when we hear that song we shared with that ex. Even as Robyn sings “I’m right back in that moment / And it makes me want to cry,” her falsetto is prominently airy in contrast with the bare-bones instrumentals, her voice soaring above the shimmery synths and low bass. The minimalist production on Honey also gives Robyn room to carve eccentricities into the sonic whitespace. “Beach2k20” is a dryly funny spoken-word track that sounds like Cabo meets Japanese lounge funk meets a videogame soundtrack. “Human Being” features an eclectic synth beat peppered with outbursts of whirs, hums, and whispers. But ultimately, the production lets Robyn center herself throughout Honey, to locate herself after the storm and start anew — “I’m a human being / Baby don’t give up on me now / I’m a human being,” she sings on “Human Being,” presenting a starkly human contrast to the sparse, sci-fi instrumentals.

Honey is so catchy from start to finish that you might not notice the dramatic emotional arc that takes place. By the last track, Robyn has reconciled with her heartbreak and moved on — “Never gonna be brokenhearted / Ever again / That shit’s out the door / I’m only gonna sing about love / Ever again,” she pledges. “Ever Again” is liberating, a blissfully weightless song that promises to work through a relationship instead of running from it, and Robyn ends the album with a casual confidence that may be more vulnerable than the moving articulations of sadness she’s perfected throughout her career. Honey is Robyn at her most optimistic, and maybe it’s not going to last — but it is a welcome phase in her sad, happy, weird, and beautiful career.

Honey was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.