ROCKIN' ROBYN.(pop singer)

ROCKIN' ROBYN -- Ten years ago, the press-shy and improbably consistent Swedish pop producer Max Martin was hired to work with a blond teen-age singer. He gave her several great pop songs driven by dance beats, and the two of them sold millions of records in the process. A few years later, Martin did the same thing with a different blond teen-age singer and sold ten times as many records. That second singer was a girl from Louisiana named Britney Spears. Martin's first client, a sixteen-year-old Swede named Robyn Carlsson, had two Top Ten American hits in 1997, including the superlative "Show Me Love," and then disappeared from the U.S. charts, though she went on to release two more albums in Europe. Spears did not disappear, and this must have irked Robyn, a superior singer and dancer whose presentation canted more toward kickboxer than Catholic schoolgirl (which may have something to do with her problems staying on our charts).

At twenty-six, Robyn is enjoying something of a comeback in Europe, thanks to a self-titled album that rivals her best work with Martin. Having absorbed a generous amount of hip-hop and American culture in the past ten years, Robyn has created a tart, minimal, defiant pop record that sits ...