Photo by Casper Sejersen

I don’t care if it’s just dopamine — when a new Robyn song enters this universe, it changes the chemistry to your body in a way that goes beyond science. It’s a blood rush. It’s butterflies in your stomach. It’s pure euphoria. It’s the musical encapsulation of that all-elusive “it” factor we as humans seek out in others which transcends the platonic and feels cosmically ordained.

With the Swedish pop queen’s first new music in seven years, we’re right back there in that moment which has defined so many of these previous peaks across her emotional highlight reel throughout her career in the listen’s future-perfect production of dance-pop by longtime collaborator Klas Åhlund. The listen spangles, shimmers, and cascades in the synthetic form all around her, seemingly dissolving all lines between the artificial and the human.

“I just need to know that I’m not alone,” she proclaims. It may be the opposite desire of where she found herself on the dance floor 14 years ago, but in a day and age of dumpster fire dating app experiences, influencer inauthenticity, and connections of mere transactional convenience, Robyn once again taps into the real heartbeat of the matter: whatever this feeling is, it can’t be captured by an algorithm, AI’d, or bottled up and injected into you. Her “Dopamine” is magic.

Robyn’s “Dopamine” single is available now on Young Records.