Robyn Proved Saturday at Portola Was for the Girls
When it comes to expressing yearning in all its emotional hues, few artists have it as dialed in as Robyn.
“I used to be embarrassed that I could only write sad love songs. Like, get over it, get a life,” she told her massive crowd during her headlining set Saturday night at the Portola Festival in San Francisco. “But then I realized life is embarrassing, and I leaned into it.”
Robyn opened the set with the retro-futuristic synth pulse of her 2010 song “Fembot,” which flowed seamlessly into “Talk to Me,” her 2026 paean to phone sex. During “Handle Me,” she turned reverent and prayerful, as if kneeling at the altar of the erotic, while she rolled on the ground and made love to the camera for tens of thousands of fans to see.
And the crowd ate it up. For the fifth year of this annual electronic music festival, amid the hard techno and grimy dubstep, there was clearly a contingent who wanted to connect to storytelling and lyrics.
People stood entranced as Robyn delivered a more stripped-down, melancholy version of “Honey,” her vocals confident and powerful, before changing out of her white mini-dress and into an oversized sequined T-shirt with bejeweled panties that gleamed beneath the lights. Exuding mature-woman sensuality, she sang about going out to clubs and feeling herself during a time in her life when she was trying to get pregnant on “Sexistential.”
At the end of the set, Robyn gave the audience what they were clearly waiting for. When the disco beat of “Call Your Girlfriend” filled the air, people looked on rapturously, maybe even a little misty-eyed, and belted their hearts out. They kept swaying — and singing — as she gave it her all for “Dancing On My Own.”
Six Sex, the Perreo-Rave Princess, Brought Campy Queer Joy
All the way from Buenos Aires, Six Sex transformed the smaller Ship Tent at the harbor’s edge into a horny fever dream, with strobes flashing as the perreo-rave princess commanded a fist-pumping queer crowd with every gyration of her hips. While the opening kicks of “Ultra Terrorific Fantasy” vibrated the small but enthusiastic audience’s eardrums, she took the stage in a hentai-esque outfit, with cleavage, micro shorts, platform rave boots and pigtails with dramatically long extensions.
The bass and hard dance beats shook the crowd’s internal organs while Six Sex delivered cartoonishly coquettish X-rated lyrics with a bratty pout. (The two male ASL interpreters also deserve props for their particularly cunty enactments of her lyrics about group sex and gay boyfriends). As the set progressed, Six Sex had the audience wrapped around her finger, fist-pumping and jumping in ecstasy.
Tove Lo Invited Everyone to Dance Out Their Heartbreak
Tove Lo gave fans a solid, hour-long set of heartbreak bangers, mostly from her brand-new album Estrus but also drawn from her catalog of 2010s hits. She set a mercurial tone for the show with the song “a lot of feelings, no solutions,” emerging in an all-black look with puffy feathered sleeves that looked like angel wings. With “I’m the cake,” she served snarky attitude with a kiss-off to a long-term lover who’s taking her for granted. She pulled the melancholy notes out of “des fleurs x stromae,” her duet with the deep-voiced French hitmaker Stromae.
There were moments of levity, too, when she introduced “source of life” with a gleeful proclamation: “It’s about pussy!” When she belted “Habits (Stay High),” her ubiquitous 2014 hit about drunkenly stumbling her way through post-breakup grief, the audience’s eyes shimmered with nostalgia as they screamed the lyrics and got their life.
More photos below.
