Robyn @ OVO Hydro, Glasgow, 26 Jun

There’s an unavoidable irony to having synth-punk trailblazers Suicide in your pre-show playlist in Glasgow, what with their set opening for The Clash ending in an axe being thrown at frontman Alan Vega’s head and all. Things have mellowed since then, but there’s a similar incongruity to Smerz, a band who were a cult concern at best less than a year ago, opening here in the enormity of the Hydro. Yet when they’re playing it makes a strange kind of sense. As much as their sound has always been a meeting of overground and underground (a Womble band if you will), they have always made music that was about pop and what it means to people as much as they have made pop itself. If you’re picking the support for the person who perfected laser-precision pop, you might as well have someone looking askance rather than directly competing. It works though; they find a new weightiness to fill the room, the bass-led Feisty in particular is twisty and angular in a way you rarely see from them.

Robyn, in her first Glasgow show in her own name for more than 15 years, is everything you could hope for from one of modern pop’s true greats. Obviously the songs are great already, but the way they’re energised live transforms them, with songs like Talk to Me, which on paper is basically Robyn by numbers, becoming battering rams of a thousand different melodies working in perfect robotic synchronisation. As much as Robyn herself is a live wire presence at the centre of it all, the set is as much as anything a miraculous feat of sound work, the snares crisper and the bass weightier than you ever get in a room of this scale. It’s an indicator of the sound obsession that comes with a lived-in love of dance music, and it’s the difference maker that turns a song like Dopamine into something with a heartbeat at the centre of its cyborg meticulousness.  

The intensity is so insistent and unrelenting that, barring a stripped-back take on Be Mine!, the pace never drops below full force, a riotous assault of strobing energy that consumes the whole room. Honestly, my notes from the gig look like the hastily assembled will of someone who’s realised too late that their parachute doesn’t work. But the final run, including the immaculate trio of With Every Heartbeat, Call Your Girlfriend and Dancing on my Own, is a wanton flex of her brilliance, elevating what was an already sublime set into perfection. Three decades in and Robyn is in the form of her life.