‘Fossora’ Is Björk’s Most Intoxicating—and Inviting—Album in Years

No matter how close Björk’s music comes to qualifying as pop—and for at least 10 years, she has strayed from the designation with seeming doggedness—she continues to go through the conceptual motions of a pop star. Each album represents its own formal era, with visual and musical aesthetics that remain consistent throughout the release and touring cycles. Björk’s commitment to a vibe is practically unsurpassed…until she completely changes course.

As her wonderful podcast Sonic Symbolism examines, each album is an answer to, and often a refutation of, what came before it. 1993’s Debut was largely produced alongside Nellee Hooper, so 1995’s Post was a “promiscuous” affair, stuffed with collaborators. Post was a cosmopolitan and extroverted portrait of time spent in London, so 1997’s Homogenic was recorded in virtual isolation in Spain. Homogenic was a sparse assault of strings and distorted, “volcanic” beats, so 2001’s Vespertine was warmed with the kind of laptop IDM that folded sometimes upwards of a hundred tracks into a single song, often with a pinprick approach to percussion. And on and on. It’s a kind of whisper-down-the-lane approach to convention breaking that keeps Björk truly avant garde and imbues each album with urgency—every time, this is what Björk has to say now.

One convention that she is seemingly unwilling to deviate from, though, is the reduced sense of melody in what she sings. It’s not that she’s atonal, per se—her music has remained plenty musical—but since 2011’s Biophilia, she’s been drifting away from the very concept of a hook. The putative center of her work has gotten harder, less user-friendly. Her recent music is less hummable than her earlier work. It seems to exist to be admired like a couture gown in a museum exhibition, and not loved, like a comfortable sweater in one’s personal wardrobe. As someone who has long understood Björk’s capacity for melody, I have found this turn alienating. She drops you off in these uncharted musical landscapes and goes about her business, absently humming a few notes over and over again to herself as she prunes the local flora.

But are these unconventional anti-earworm melodies not excuses, as Björk sings in lead Fossora single “Atopos,” to not connect? Her 10th album is no more “catchy” than 2015’s Vulnicura or 2017’s Utopia, and yet, from my perspective, it’s her most inviting record in years. I haven’t enjoyed a Björk album so much since Vespertine. This may have something to do with how much I have enjoyed her podcast, in which she generously shares her motivation for each project and rationally walks people through it. She is, as always, prone to outlandish metaphor (in an upcoming episode, she compares Utopia to a baby albino giraffe) but the overall effect is straightforward. For someone whose sounds are frequently alien in the most thrilling sense, for someone who has been called an alien herself, Björk is capable of being refreshingly down to earth.

But are these unconventional anti-earworm melodies not excuses, as Björk sings in lead Fossora single ‘Atopos,’ to not connect?

So is Fossora, her self-described “mushroom album.” The flute-forward Utopia was full of air, intentionally light on the low end, but Fossora is a booming beast, thanks to the employment of a gaggle of bass clarinets and pummeling bass, assisted by Indonesian duo Gabber Modus Operandi. The relatively sparse but massive production—a direct sonic confrontation—is tonally reminiscent of Homogenic, but there’s a much more pronounced sense of groove on Fossora. Whereas Homogenic stunned in its contrasts (giant, jagged beats that chafed classical-sounding strings), Fossora’s connectedness is its point. And while the clarinets/gabber beats form the spine of the sound, Fossora also ventures into Medúlla-esque vocalizing, and it even takes off to flutter around for a bit on “Allow,” a track originally intended for Utopia. Björk generally sticks to the assignment she’s drawn up for herself, but she gives herself enough room for general Björkiness.

In the press for Fossora, Björk made clear that she’s more enchanted by mycelium than zonked on psilocybin, and yet many of the tracks here are in fact trippy. The clarinets give an almost slapstick sensibility to the tracks on which they appear. There’s an oddness in the air, a disconcerting sense that things could go awry (during the bridge of “Atopos,” a mild drone sounds like a speaker that hasn’t been grounded properly). One trope that Björk has returned to repeatedly throughout her solo career is a mounting song structure that erupts into a sonic tantrum during a track’s conclusion. She employed this in “Hyper-ballad,” Volta’s “Wanderlust,” and Biophilia’s “Crystalline.” It happens some half a dozen times on Fossora, and each time these songs flip into gabber techno double time, their realities take a hard left. It’s like when the mushrooms kick in and things, while still recognizable, are clearly no longer the same. The title track’s last minute finds multiple Björk voices in various stages of distortion and harmony, and is, as calculated, utterly transcendent. With its forbidding foghorn, “Victimhood,” perhaps Björk’s final statement on the breakup of her marriage (which she explored in greater detail and self-pity on Vulnicura) finds her willing to push through darkness instead of running away from it—exactly what you’re supposed to do to avoid a bad trip.

Even the stuff that doesn’t rev up so directly works—the clanking eulogy to her mother, “Ancestress,” is moving without being maudlin. “Ovule” spins a bunch of plates—brass, beats, Björk’s voice—that only occasionally seem to line up, but their out-of-sync-ness is just as alluring.

Regarding that voice, what Björk is doing with it on Fossora seems no longer at odds with the musicality. She remains prone to melodic ruts that find her repeating a handful of notes over and over, until she picks another handful of notes to repeat over and over. It’s quite telling that guest vocalists Emilie Nicolas and Serpentwithfeet, on “Allow” and “Fungal City,” respectively, elevate the vocals by just singing what Björk does with a little more music in their voices. But virtually everywhere on Fossora, her voice can be interpreted as another layer of an intoxicating design of sound—a component, not the main attraction.

Accepting it as such requires a refocusing of one’s senses, a true willingness to take this music as it is and not what, based on the past and how pop functions, a listener believes it should be. In pop, the voice has long been the focus, but Björk’s recent work, especially on Fossora, argues that it need not be. It is democratizing. As an auteur, so much of what’s on her records comes from her, and, like the mycelium she rhapsodizes, it’s all connected anyway. Fossora is her most succinct illustration of this concept yet.