Of the many musical arguments I enjoyed last year, two in particular stand out, and came closest to ending with my being punched in the face. The first was when I suggested that Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Stone Roses should join Foo Fighters in the Top 10 of the most overrated bands of all time. The second occurred during a heated discussion about the merits or otherwise of modern pop music, which I suggested was the least understood or respected of musical genres. To back up my case, I cited Britney Spears’s album Blackout, arguably recent pop’s most musically inventive reflection on, and forensic examination of, modern celebrity; and, as exhibit B, the Swedish singer Robyn and, more particularly, her No 1 single With Every Heartbeat. Phrases such as “devil’s advocate”, “deliberately perverse” and “intellectual posturing” were hurled as fisticuffs loomed. What is it about pop? What’s not, as the saying goes, to like?

The creator of With Every Heartbeat is in a better position than most to answer this question: she had her first Swedish hit single when she was 16, later scoring huge worldwide hits with pop songs such as Show Me Love and Do You Know (What It Takes). Last year’s self-titled comeback album managed to be sly without being cynical: it wore the candy coating of classic pop, but wreaked havoc behind this glossy facade, as when she excoriated a music-industry sleazebag on the song Handle Me, with the unforgettable put-down: “You’re a selfish narcissistic psycho freaking bootlicking Nazi creep.” The line comes, it should be noted, at the end of a killer chorus. A killer pop chorus.

“I can’t abandon something I love,” says the singer about her chosen genre. “That would be so untrue; I would be a sucker. It is so much more fun questioning things, and doing that in pop music, than doing a folky record for 5,000 people, talking about how horrible the world is. That’s not a challenge.” When, after years of dissatisfaction, she bought herself out of her major-label deal and set up her own company, Konichiwa, in 2005, Robyn was expected by many to turn her back on the music she’d been making up until that point – a move many saw as being confirmed by her decision to start working immediately with the Swedish electropop siblings the Knife. She says she never saw it that way, and that this expectation in itself revealed an abiding snobbery about pop and people’s fear of being manipulated. They are, she says, wary of something direct and prefer “not to feel too emotional, or to be able to intellectualise what they’re feeling. My mum is an actress and my dad is a director, so I always took it for granted that, okay, theatre has these set rules: a stage, a text, an actor and an audience. There’s a language, and you can use that language not in a way that’s manipulating, but more like, ‘This is what you’re supposed to think. Now, how do you actually feel?’ And that’s how I’ve always looked at pop”. Its notional musical restrictions are, she thinks, “a challenge, but also easier, not in a bad way, but in terms of getting to where you want faster”.

The album triumphed in her home country, and Robyn, at first, thought that would be that. A toe-dipping EP release in Britain late in 2005 was our first introduction to the “new” Robyn. Its Cure-sampling lead track, Konichiwa Bitches, certainly seemed to display a changed intent. And on track four she explicitly drew a line between her teenage self and her new enterprise: Be Mine, all glacial piano and heart-wrenching lyrics, sounded like a No 1. In its new form, pumped up with Papa Don’t Preach-like beats and strings (and with an added exclamation mark), it may very well be just that when it’s released as a single later this month.

Yet candy coating can have its drawbacks: a surface appeal often leads to superficial understanding. The song’s Leader of the Pack-style spoken-word middle eight – “I saw you at the station / You had your arm around what’s-her-name / She had on that scarf I gave you” – caused a lot of excitement when she began promoting the song on commercial radio shows. “They’d be like, ‘So, who was this boy who broke your heart? When did it happen?’,” she sighs. “But, of course, it didn’t happen – I imagined it. If you’re dumped, you feel like a teenager, no matter how old you are. I deliberately decided to go back to that feeling.” That element of “decision”, as opposed to compulsion, is often used by pop’s detractors as a stick to beat the genre with – as if calculation as an approach to creating the desired effect were somehow unique to it. “These days,” Robyn says scathingly, “we have artifice and then we have ‘real’. We’ve lost the in between.”

Yet it is there, she argues, that most art occurs and communicates. Crucially, too, Sweden is, she says, “too small a country for people to be able to isolate themselves within genres. We have to communicate with each other and work across styles for anything to happen”.

Setting up Konichiwa was not, then, a case of her rejecting the method of communication – the language of pop – but a refusal to put up any longer with the means. “Your value is how many records you sell,” she says, recalling her hit-factory days. “It’s like you’re a racehorse or something. But it’s weird when a record company has a closer relationship with a product than with a young human being who is making that product. When my parents were on stage, they had an audience because they were doing what they did, they were looking at the human condition, at things that were close to people’s emotional lives. But I used to see my audiences and think, ‘It’s not like they’re here for me, they are here to get a fix – and my record company wants to keep feeding that fix.’ The whole experience was a test: where do I find myself in this? And it wasn’t by saying ‘I’m not pop’, but by saying, ‘Just let me do it how I want to.’ ” She did. The result was, with Blackout, one of last year’s most sonically exhilarating and radical albums. As Robyn so brilliantly proves, pop is where it’s at. I don’t want to start another argument, but you’ve got to be a fool not to recognise that.

Be Mine! is released on January 14

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