The words are falling out my mouth before I’ve had a chance to shove them back in. Is it unprofessional to ask Robyn for a cigarette? I’m not sure. But she’s flinging one across the table, and it’s already between my lips. And now she’s picking up her matches, leaning forward to light it. Robyn is lighting my cigarette. For a second, my mind tries to absorb the image. A crown of blonde spikes. The whisper of a flame. And then I’m breathing in horrible Marlboro smoke and the moment has passed, joining all the other moments before it.

I’m not the only person for whom Robyn is kind of an icon. There’s a look people give each other across a gay club when her songs come on – half an eye roll at our own eternal heartbreak, and half exhilaration because we know what’s coming, and that it sounds especially good on proper speakers. Her seven studio albums spanning 15 years, from 1995 until 2010, are monumental in their influence – to read a brilliant deep dive on the Swedish musician’s artistry, peep this recent Guardian longread – but in the years since, she’s also amassed a slower, more cult sort of following: one that exists on dancefloors (often queer ones), in dark basements dappled in pink and blue lights, in the spaces between sadly swirling your drink with a straw and deciding to knock it back, returning to the hot, heaving miasma of bodies beside you.

To truly understand why such a cult following exists, we need to lean in closer, to the music itself. Many of her most well-known hits – “Dancing On My Own”, “Call Your Girlfriend”, “With Every Heartbeat” – are rapturous, synth-filled dance tracks, their sound steely and glittering, like a carefully constructed robot. But they’re also more than that. She takes these immensely painful feelings – grief, jealousy, unrequited longing – and encourages you to lean into them, encasing yourself in sadness, euphoria, respite. I can’t think of any other artist who does that – at least not in the same way. “It’s just so relentless,” Perfume Genius recently told Pitchfork, in reference to “With Every Heartbeat” and that specific ‘Robyn Sound’. “She’s singing ‘And it hurts with every heartbeat’ over and over and over… She wants you to know that she’s still there, even though it hurts.”

Her upcoming album, Honey – her first in eight years (more on that later) – also combines those aforementioned elements. But the record equally sounds like nothing she’s released before. True to its title, a stickiness and softness and sensuality permeates the whole thing; the synths are warmer, the beats less clinical, her vocals easy, gliding and humming above them. Gone are the jagged electric thwacks that pound on songs like “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do,” replaced instead by a deep and syrupy glow. She’s still encouraging you to lean into your feels, but this time she’s also saying: ease up a little bit, slow down, let it go. “I’m never going to be broken-hearted, ever again,” she sighs on the closing track, later winking: “that shit got so lame.”