Robyn’s New Song Is The Dopamine Boost You’ve Been Looking For

Just when we’ve gone heads-down putting together our year-end lists, Robyn decided to complicate things with a brand new single that’s good enough to make us rethink everything.

After teasing her return earlier this week, the “Dancing On My Own” singer dropped “Dopamine,” her first song in over seven years, on Wednesday Nov. 12. The track features all the makings of a Robyn classic: sticky verses over an electronic beat, a sweetly saccharine chorus, and three minutes and 38 seconds of pure dopamine-inducing euphoria. “I know it’s just dopamine / But it feels so real to me / We’re tripping on our chemistry / It’s firing up inside of me,” the Swede sings.

The accompanying music video is much more subdued, however. Instead of the flashing lights and bright colors that the high-octane song calls for, the visuals see Robyn wearing a plain white tee and grey zip-up hoodie and dancing in front of a blue backdrop for most of the song, only embracing her maximalist side with a dance in the rain à la Flashdance.

“Everyone has a phone where they see their heart rate, and we’re learning how to decode our emotions through the hormones and chemical substances in our bodies,” Robyn says in the song’s press release. “It’s almost like we don’t even accept that we’re human anymore, like we’re trying to shoot ourselves out of it and explain every single thing — which I think is great, but that’s also why the world is sh*t, this idea that you can figure out and win life or something.”

“The doubleness of Dopamine is having an emotion that is super real, super strong, intense, enjoyable or painful, and at the same time knowing that this is just a biological process in my body — and then not to choose religion or science. To just accept that they’re there together and to be able to go in between,” she says.

“Dopamine” is available to stream now.