Robyn

Robyn makes pop that works on a dancefloor and hurts anyway. The productions are built out of club music, with house pulse, disco warmth and a good deal of air left between the parts, and she sings across them in a conversational register rather than belting over the top.

The songs hold two things at once on purpose: elation and grief, motion and paralysis, and they rarely resolve into one or the other. She started young inside the machinery of major-label pop and then rebuilt her career on her own terms, which is where the music she is best known for actually begins. She works by collaboration rather than command, crediting the producers and musicians around her instead of standing in front of them.

The result is pop with no gloss laid over the difficult part. Robyn writes songs that let a listener feel two contradictory things at once without pretending that either one has won.