![]() The intricate way that Björk’s voice twines with Iceland’s famous Hamrahlíð Choir, which Björk sang in when she was a child, calls to mind a flickering bulb. Björk explained, “You look at a girl, they’re one day old, and they have 400 eggs inside of them. “In a woman’s lifetime / she gets 400 eggs / But only two or three nests,” goes one line. The lyrics, written in a stream of consciousness, present what she called a “biological obituary” of her mom. Of the two songs on the album addressing the death of Björk’s mother in 2018, the hymnlike “Sorrowful Soil” is the sadder one, capturing the moment when Björk and her brother began to realize there wasn’t much time left for their ailing parent. Some of it is personal, some of it is universal, some of it is me, some of it is my friends. “Each song is a coordinate, an emotional coordinate,” Björk told me. Trying to honor the shared ineffability of life-the way that we all have our individuality in common-is a means of creating connection. Philosophers use the term atopos to refer to something “unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality,” as Roland Barthes wrote in the book that informed this song. On a yet-deeper level, the song distills what makes Björk’s music unique. It is also, the lyrics say, “a form of hiding”: a defense mechanism, an avoidance of intimacy. Extremism-“pursuing the light too hard,” she sings-doesn’t just prevent unity. Written during Donald Trump’s presidency, Björk’s lyrics preach about the psychology of moderation and compromise. In Iceland, we discussed most of the album’s songs, which are dissected below.Ī high-drama protest song that eventually explodes into a rave, the opening track is designed to, as Björk illustrates in the music video, get people pumping their fists. Part singer-songwriter memoir, part philosophical treatise, and part danceable adventure, it ranks among her most rewarding works. But, and this is crucial, they do have a shape.Ĭreated over five years in Iceland, Fossora reveals itself, with repeated listens, as warm, satisfying, and even addictive: an invitation to stomp around and sing along. She wails and exhales in meters and melodies of unpredictable shape. Björk’s defining instrument, her voice, remains a challenge-and a wonder. That’s not just because it features clarinets, brass, and strings juxtaposed with the stormy electronic dance style known as gabber. ![]() Fossora, her tenth solo album (out today), certainly takes some getting used to. ![]() That interpretation makes some sense once you’ve tuned your ears to Björk’s frequency and absorbed her intentions. “Overall, the BPM, or the amount of chill, or the amount of experimental, or the amount of pop sugar, or the amount of self-reflective, serious moments-I think it’s actually sort of been the same throughout my albums.” “Maybe they remember themselves in some club doing ecstasy and there were three remixes in a row,” she said. ![]() When I met with the 56-year-old musician in Iceland for The Atlantic’s recent profile of her, she expressed mystification at people who say her ’90s stuff was more fun. These days, her work can seem less like pop than, as The Guardian’s Chal Ravens recently put it, “surreal opera.”ījörk doesn’t think in these terms. After the eclectic earworms of her first three solo albums ( Debut in 1993, Post in 1995, and Homogenic in 1997), she moved through surprising phases, ranging from soft murmuring (2001’s Vespertine) to splattering noise (2017’s Utopia). One common way of viewing Björk’s career is as a long descent into the bizarre.
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