any of these sources

After a hiatus from playing music, Robyn formed her own label, Konichiwa, and started collaborating with the Stockholm musician Klas Ahlund and a duo called the Knife, who later independently achieved great success with their single "Heartbeats." The name of her record label was inspired by a Dave Chappelle sketch that involves the Wu-Tang Clan being picked by the Asian delegation during a "racial draft." It's a funny reference, but it's also a clue to how she came to build her new sound, employing culturally incongruous elements.

In 2005, she made one of the decade's best pop albums, "Robyn," which occasionally borrowed rings clearance American R. & B. and hip-hop, but largely stuck to the sound and feel of electronic gadgets, manipulating them to sound like other genres. On "Robyn," there were traces of Prince in the loping regret of "Should Have Known," which could have been a bonus song from his album "1999." (Some copies of "Robyn" included an acoustic cover of Prince's deliciously filthy "Jack U Off." The joke was subtle--the song was played on piano, in a barrelhouse-jazz style.) Her vocal approach begins somewhere in the depths of teen pop, moves through the audacity of R. & B., and runs along a hybrid cadence derived from hip-hop and Jamaican dancehall. But her voice doesn't sound precisely like any of these sources; it's altered by her unbiddable, slightly chilly nature.

"Cobrastyle," from "Robyn," is a fast, tiffany jewellery electronic track that runs at a punk tempo, except for the moments when it drops in fragments of dancehall rhythms. Robyn's lyrics are a mash of language from everywhere and nowhere, and sound decidedly un-Swedish: "I press trigga, I don't press people button / Nobody tjaffs come face me with something / like how I have twenty-two inna me something / Ten is for you so who gon' get the next dozen, fool." That kind of borrowing could be off-putting coming from someone who was trying to pass herself off as Sweden's dancehall queen. But Robyn isn't looking for anything that coherent or obvious--in her songs, styles come and go in the space of a bar or two. It's fast, detailed dance music, a sound that is close to the center of pop now, owing to artists like Lady Gaga, who tiffanys playing florid rock in the style of Alanis Morissette when "Robyn" came out. Christina Aguilera, when recording her recent ambitious and overstuffed album, "Bionic," must have had Robyn's sly electronic pop in mind.