Robyn Gets the Whole Crowd Dancing at Portola 2026

Everyone knew “Dancing on My Own” was coming. The pleasure of Robyn's Saturday set at Portola was how much there was to enjoy before it arrived. Her songs about wanting someone, losing someone, and finding yourself in the aftermath still sound unusually clear-eyed. On the Pier Stage, she put the familiar material next to songs from this year's Sexistential and made the connection between them easy to hear. The desire is still there; the circumstances have changed.

Opening with “Fembot” and moving into “Talk to Me” was an effective way to establish that continuity. The robotic playfulness of the older song sits comfortably beside the new one's frankness. “Hang With Me” followed, then “Dopamine”, and “Honey,” giving the set room to move between pop immediacy and a more patient kind of longing. 

Her presence was as physical as the material demands. The willingness to look a little unruly matters. Robyn sings about feelings people often try to conceal, and she moves with a similar lack of embarrassment. The choreography and the vulnerability belong to the same show.

“Life,” her collaboration with Jamie xx, led into “Don't Fucking Tell Me What to Do,” a particularly good pairing of release and refusal. The newer title track and “Light Up” kept the set grounded in her current work, while “Indestructible” and “With Every Heartbeat” brought back two songs in which emotional insistence is inseparable from the beat. Her catalog offers plenty of reasons to sing along, but also rewards listening to how a repeated phrase changes as the music builds around it.

The closing pair of “Call Your Girlfriend” and “Dancing on My Own” was a generous finish. Both songs are full of other people: the partner who needs to be told, the lover across the room, the person you cannot stop watching. Yet they give the singer an unmistakable voice inside those situations. 

The newer songs held their own around that finish, and Robyn gave them the same full-bodied commitment as the classics. Her writing remains frank about desire and attentive to the awkward feelings that accompany it. Onstage, she let all of that become physical. The last song was the expected one, but knowing what was coming did nothing to lessen its effect. After an hour spent inside her particular world of pop, singing along felt almost inevitable.