There’s Something Else If You Listen

Kindness featuring Robyn “Who Do You Love?”

I really wasn’t feeling Robyn’s work with Royksopp last year, not because it was in any way bad, but because it just sorta predictable and dull to me. A lot of that has to do with the production style, which was very beat heavy and air tight – it just felt very overbearing and unfun to me in a way the best Robyn songs do not. This collaboration with the producer Kindness is very much in the opposite direction. There’s a lot of negative space in this arrangement, and the song moves in this stop/start pattern that mirrors the unsure tone of the lyrics. The music implies a lot of space but an intimate scale, and this does a lot of favors for Robyn’s voice and her lyrics – she always excels at getting across the subtleties of rather ordinary relationship drama. Here she’s singing about struggling to make a true romantic connection, and you can hear the frustration in her voice. She wants a transformative emotional reaction, but it’s not happening. But she’s there, fighting through that numbness to find a true, meaningful feeling and it’s beautiful.

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