Hook & Reel: ‘Honey’ is the pinnacle of Robyn’s artistic majesty

Welcome to Hook & Reel, a series showcasing music that’s guaranteed to catch your ear.

To call Robyn’s music beautiful and bittersweet would be stating the most obvious truth. Everyone who’s ever cried quietly in their bedroom while twirling to “Dancing On My Own,” skipped down sun-kissed city sidewalks to “Hang With Me,”or imagined themselves doing the Naomi Campbell walk away from an ex to the tune of “With Every Heartbeat” can attest to that. And maybe the intense and borderline poetic buildup to “Honey,” and the how-is-this-really-happening prospect of a new Robyn record for the first time in eight years has clouded my judgement, but the title track to her forthcoming album (out in less than a month!) may be her most beautiful and bittersweet song yet.

The sucker punch lies in the refrain, which pours gracefully from Robyn’s vocal chords over a bed of lavish keys at the song’s opening – “honey” not as the term of endearment, but as an adjective for not being enough, being sweet and scintillating in the moment but knowing you can’t truly fulfill your lover’s needs in the long term. It’s a come-on, a beckoning, but with a level of introspection that aches, a kind of visceral and jagged self-acceptance and understanding deeply steeped in longing. And around this admission, she builds cavernous dance-halls filled with billowing synthesizers, while using thunderous four-to-the-floor beats to frame promises of boundless desire and wonder.

I heard “Honey” for the first time almost a year and a half ago, sitting in a secluded call room at work, scrambling to rewind the SoundCloud rip, trying to compose myself as I turned up the volume, straining to hear every single note buried underneath the voice overs from the ending credits of that Girls episode. Even in its lo-fi form, terse and percussive and barely discernible, it still felt validating and raw, blistering yet soothing and so of-the-moment that I wanted the entire world to stop so I could indefinitely immerse myself in it. “Honey” felt like a gift, sprung forth from my own harsh reality to remind me that I wasn’t alone.

That feeling of worthlessness had been articulated a thousand times over in a thousand different ways by hundreds other musicians, but hearing those words in that moment from Robyn, they took on a different kind of energy. They felt powerful and picturesque, artistic and moving, somehow uplifting even in their sorrow. They made me feel like Robyn was standing in that room singing to me and me only, gently hugging me, wiping the tears from my eyes and telling me that when it was all said and done, everything would be okay.

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