It's possible that Robyn, the Swedish singer who reached No 1 with With Every Heartbeat in 2007, is a little bit too interesting ever to be a contemporary pop star. Certainly, opening a mini-album – the first of three she plans to release this year – with a song called Don't Fucking Tell Me What to Do and closing with a traditional Swedish ballad, Jag Vet en Dejlig Rosa, is not in the Simon Cowell playbook. But those bookends are clues to both her defiant independence of spirit and her versatility within the pop idiom, and show precisely why she should be treasured. Of the other six songs, Dancing On My Own's pulsing synths and electronic percussion manage to sound both jackbooted and ineffably melancholy, Cry When You Get Older is blessed with a melody that sounds as if it came from Celtic folk music but is here reshaped into sophisticated electropop, while the piano-and-strings ballad Hang With Me is blessed with a startlingly sincere performance that adds weight even to its lyrical cliches.
