Bjork, Fossora
★★★★
The annals of pop have long been decorated with brilliant eccentrics, from David Bowie and Prince to Kate Bush and Grace Jones. Perhaps none, however, are quite as singularly quirky and celebrated as Bjork, the Icelandic pop savant whose every release since 1993’s Debut has been met with breathless anticipation from fans eager to discover her latest universe.
The title of her latest album Fossora loosely translates to “she who digs” and its cover art depicts Bjork as a luminescent high-fashion high priestess crouching above a magical mushroom underworld. The mushrooms symbolise the sense of nourishing groundedness Bjork, 56, has felt over the past two years after moving back to Iceland full-time during the pandemic, and though there’s been a notable loss (the 2018 death of her mother) since her last album, 2017’s Utopia, the mood is still buoyant. “My fungus period has been bubbly,” she said in a video shot for Pitchfork at her fantastical cabin home, featuring walls covered in tufts of wool resembling pastel fairy-floss and an ornate octagonal outdoors reverb chamber for singing.
Bjorks new album takes listeners into the mushroom underworld.Credit:Vidar Logi
Across the album, Bjork foregrounds the bass clarinet, an instrument well-suited to embodying the woody earthiness of fungi. It also lends a distinctly folk-like character to these songs, many of which feel fit to soundtrack an Icelandic pantomime — at least in parts (there is also a rendition of an actual Icelandic folk song, Fagurt Er í Fjörðum) — while cacophonous and abrasive elements act more like the psychedelic varieties of mushrooms, providing jarring, strangely beautiful disruptions.
Warm woodwinds with alternately soaring and plucky strings introduce Fungal City, featuring the creamy vocals of experimental musician Serpentwithfeet alongside Bjork’s breathy wailing. The singers’ reverie is eventually pierced by icy synth stabs that transform the scene into a strangely bucolic techno bunker. On the opening track, Atopos, organic drumming starts out conventionally enough, then erupts into the kind of hammering beats most associated with a Dutch subgenre of hardcore techno called gabber (Indonesian punk-club duo Gabber Modus Operandi provide percussion on multiple tracks). The title track also mimics this progression, with the drumming eventually reaching a speed and intensity most commonly associated with Berlin nightclubs. By the song’s end, each blow feels like a reforging of the self. These frenzied bursts of energy mirror Bjork’s life during COVID, she says, when, amidst all the enforced isolation, small gatherings at her place would often ascend into full-throttle dance parties where Bjork would DJ gabber tracks.
Bjork’s new album Fossora.
Other songs are more plainly pretty. On Sorrowful Soil, an ode to her late mother, the environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, a sparse bass line is the only accompaniment to Bjork’s multitracked vocals, arranged in her inimitably unorthodox fashion, and a choir. Bjork’s son Sindri Eldon provides backing harmonies on Ancestress, a lovely, resonant, epitaph for Hauksdóttir, while metallic sounds mimicking hammer and nails hint at a spiritual rebuilding. Romantic songs, such as Freefall (I let myself freefall into your arms, into the shape of love we have created…) and Ovule (now/with your romantic intelligence/sensual tenderness/we dissolve old habits) contribute to the album’s optimism without dominating it, while on Her Mother’s House Bjork comes to terms with being an empty nester following the departure of her 19-year-old daughter Ísadóra Bjarkardóttir Barney, who co-wrote the lyrics and sings (beautifully) on the track.
If Utopia depicted Bjork’s euphoric emergence from the heaviness that coloured 2015’s post-divorce album, Vuniculura, Fossora represents a more tethered, peaceful equilibrium where sadness is acknowledged but is not the main character. Bjork’s feet might be firmly planted on the ground, but she’s looking toward the light.
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