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Robyn is back with delirious, funky club cut 'Love Is Free'

Robyn is back with delirious, funky club cut 'Love Is Free'

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The first single from a mini-album coming this summer

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Here's a summer tradition I can get behind: Robyn and a few musically inclined friends, coming together to lend the world some dancefloor heat. "Love Is Free" is the first track from Robyn & La Bagatelle Magique, a band fleshed out by tour bandmate Markus Jägerstedt and the late producer Christian Falk. The song is the first single from a mini-album the band is releasing this summer, and the studio version was unveiled during a Thursday afternoon interview with BBC DJ Annie Mac.

"Love Is Free" is a major departure from the music on last year's Do It Again mini-album, Robyn's collaboration with Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp. Those songs were cold, sometimes brittle, and monolithic in form, and they had a distinct set of thematic concerns: legacy, technology, repetition, erosion. Debuted on tour last year alongside another new song called "Set Me Free," "Love Is Free" is warm and celebratory, with the freneticism and humid pulse of great '90s house. The verses from Robyn and guest rapper Maluca are hard-edged, but not sharp — they're inviting. If love is free, they're happy to share.

If love is free, they're happy to share

In an interview with FACT Magazine, Robyn talked about the song's thematic flexibility: "It could be, love is free like ‘free love’. It could [be] a gay anthem, it could be [about how] you can’t control life. It can be ‘screw you I’m gonna stand on my own two feet’. For me, it’s more like a definition of this weird thing that’s really hard to define, which is the unknown. The things you can’t control. To me, that’s what it is." We'll hear more from Robyn & La Bagatelle Magique's mini-album in a few weeks.