“They wrote a song about us/ It’s called something like stardust,” sings Robyn on Honey, a haunted masterclass in pop effervescence and emotional plainspeak. Or maybe that’s something like “Stardust,” the Hoagy Carmichael standard about how love is beautiful but never lasts. Disarming though it may be to hear the future-pop auteur and self-described “fembot” reciting from the dog-eared pages of the Great American Songbook, it’s a trustworthy compass blade for Honey’s lovelorn mood and heart-on-sleeve candor. This music is ravishingly emotional, but it’s also stoically utilitarian and subtly cerebral. It’s made to wash over you, a blissful current of deep feels, but also to provide helpful paradigms for self-care, and even to interrogate pop music’s vocabulary of grieving and resilience. You can enjoy the record on whichever of those levels you like, but what you’re probably going to want to do is just sit with it a while: Honey is a warm cocoon of an album. It offers you space in which to luxuriate. Its greatest virtue is its space-filling, mood-altering presence, guaranteed to change the weather in any room where it’s played.

It’s the first full-length Robyn has made under her own name since 2010’s Body Talk, and its gestation was anything but balmy. There was the death of a musical confrere; romantic dissolution; ongoing psychoanalysis; then at last, reconciliation with her lover. Honey maps it all out with diaristic precision; its nine songs are presented in the order in which they were written, and it’s the rare album that benefits from such a deeply confessional chronology. Its rhythms are those of hurt and healing; self-discovery and sustained vulnerability. It charts an emotional journey, something reflected in how the album blossoms; it’s disconsolate at first, then soul-searching, and in the end sanguine.

Robyn used the album’s themes as incubators for its sound. Her back pages are resplendent with bangers, tight and punchy singles drawn with clean lines and irresistible hooks, some of them shepherded into being with pop ninja Max Martin. (Body Talk was lined with self-contained stunners: “Indestructible,” “Love Kills,” “Time Machine,” etc.) Honey is ostensibly banger-free, though “Between the Lines” at least qualifies as a low-key thumper. (Your taxonomies may vary.) Working with a revolving panel of producers—Martin not among them—Robyn remains a redoubtable practitioner in sparkling pop perfection, but here her four-on-the-floor steeliness is softened; opening song “Missing U” shimmers and glows, its beats seeming to dissolve into glitter as soon as they hit the air. It’s a fitting tactility for a song that portrays a love like stardust, sparkling and ephemeral; “this residue is all I’ve got,” Robyn croons, a fembot rusting in her own tears (and only she could make a word like “residue” glisten the way it does here). “Baby Forgive Me” exemplifies Robyn’s new approach—“soft ecstasy,” she calls it—by unfolding with layer upon delicate layer of ethereal synths and whispered harmonies; it’s quiet but insistent, gentle in its caress but propulsive in its momentum. These songs mirror the singer’s state of mind—vulnerable, unguarded, but still committed to forward motion.

She pairs her new softness with songs that are a little more borderless than usual. She can still draw those clean lines—check the string-swept disco pop “Because It’s in the Music,” an uncorked bottle of wistful nostalgia—but in other instances she works in free form, as on the swirling “Send to Robin Immediately,” which boasts some of her sharpest hooks but is more like a trance than a pop single. The loungy exotica of “Beach2k20” hardly qualifies as a song at all; it’s a vibe, a five-minute working holiday in the world’s hippest elevator. The porousness of these songs has thematic resonance: As “Send to Robin Immediately” fades in she’s still singing the lyrics from “Baby Forgive Me,” suggesting feelings that bleed into each other and don’t always fit into tidy compartments.

Those feelings can be stumbling blocks for the singer. “All these emotions are out of date,” she laments on the heavy-hearted “Human Being,” her red-bloodedness a glowing ember against the song’s android pulse. On “Missing U,” she’s burdened by memories. “Don’t know how to use ‘em,” she admits—yet Honey is ultimately about how you can use brokenness and loss. The melancholy is immersive, especially in the album’s first half, but the point isn’t to wallow; it’s to feel, to give validation to grief, to be changed and to move on. “Baby Forgive Me” comes from a place of contrition, and advocates for generosity and reconciliation over relational politics; “You got the power/ You set the price/ But baby, be fair/ Be nice,” the song pleads. “Send to Robin Immediately” underscores the urgent need for candor: “If you got something to say/ I need to hear it.” (Isn’t it Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians that admonishes us not to let the sun go down without confessing the contents of our secret hearts?) Even the tropical holiday in “Beach2k20” has a therapeutic undercurrent: Sometimes the most soothing balm, for a troubled relationship or for precarious mental health, is just to get away.

Though Honey largely skips dancefloor heat in favor of easygoing sways, it’s still very much music nourished by bodily intimacy. That’s true of “Honey,” the album’s fulcrum, an overflow of warm eroticism following the album’s chillier first half, and it’s true in “Human Being,” which finds something tangible and grounding in physical closeness. By extension, Honey is an analysis of how the music that moves our bodies can also move our emotional needle. It gets pretty meta in “Because It’s in the Music,” about the power of a song to conjure unbidden ghosts; this is where “Stardust” is invoked, yet the song slowly becomes its own subject matter, a trigger for pained memories. Honey ends with “Ever Again,” funk that comes on soft and insistent. (The song channels Prince in how its kinetics are so smooth; it’s a body-mover in stealth mode.) Here, all the ghosts are banished; “that shit’s out the door,” Robyn says, then vowing that she’s “never gonna be brokenhearted ever again.” It’s a promise that even she must know can’t be kept, but pop music isn’t first and foremost a place for logic and argument; it’s a place for feeling, and Robyn’s inward-looking pop fantasia earns the right to end with one of the most indelible ones of all—the feeling of being indestructibly in love.