When Robyn first played Pitchfork in 2010, she was the closest thing to a mainstream pop artist the festival had ever booked. That day, her glistening dance music stood out on a stage whose lineup also featured the relatively hard-edged sounds of rapper El-P and rockers Modest Mouse. But her first Pitchfork booking seemed to open the door for the festival to include more pop in that vein: Sky Ferreira in 2013, Grimes in 2014, and most prominently Carly Rae Jepsen in 2016. In some ways this phenomenon mirrors the way Robyn’s career has opened doors for pop singers to break out of prescribed cookie-cutter molds. “Robyn has definitely been part of paving the way for pop stars who fall a little to the left of the Top 40 norm,” her disciple Charli XCX told the Guardian last year.

Sky Ferreira Fri 7/19, 4:15-5:10 PM, Green Stage

Haim Fri 7/19, 8:30-9:50 PM, Green Stage

Charli XCX Sun 7/21, 7:25-8:25 PM, Red Stage

Robyn Sun 7/21, 8:30-9:50 PM, Green Stage

Like many pop stars before them, the Haim sisters first gained attention for their ability to condense stories into four catchy minutes. Their 2013 debut, Days Are Gone, featured enough brilliant bite-size pop songs to cause rifts among critics: Was “Falling” Haim’s best of the year, or was it “If I Could Change Your Mind”? No, it was definitely “The Wire,” a polished track on which lead singer Danielle shares vocals with Este and Alana. It’s easy to see these Pitchfork newcomers as a rock band—they draw heavily from Fleetwood Mac—but they follow a pop blueprint. It’s undeniable once you listen to “Want You Back,” a standout from their second album, 2017’s Something to Tell You—good luck getting its soaring chorus out of your head.

Robyn told Caryn Ganz in 2010 that the three central pillars of a pop song are love, the club, and feeling like an outsider. Eight years later, Jayson Greene called it “the Robyn Feeling: sad, exultant, vanquished, triumphant.” Regardless of how it’s put, Robyn’s songs have melancholy hearts, despite the urgency of their push to the dance floor. At a festival that doesn’t shy away from sadness—it booked the War on Drugs against Fleet Foxes last year, for instance, and hosted A Tribe Called Quest’s first performance without Phife Dog in 2017—she fits right in. But unlike those artists, Robyn is also about the catharsis of dancing.