![]() The Land Rover bobbles down a rocky slope to what Björk calls her “cabin”-actually a vast, two-floor lodge where she holidays, hikes, writes albums, rehearses clarinet sextets, and hosts weddings, as the feeling takes her. They instantly line up alongside the most heart-rending songs of her career. ![]() ![]() At the album’s core are the hymn-like “Sorrowful Soil” and chamber-folk epic “Ancestress,” bold artistic strides that serve as profound tributes to her late mother, the environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, who died in 2018. She still writes killer love songs, too, using her skin-prickling voice to unknot cramps of the heart she is still psychically attuned to the little acts of self-sabotage that adults, fearing love, perform to avoid submitting to it. Whether chronicling a failing climate, an expiring marriage, or a family torn, her songs remain outlandishly, beguilingly her own.įossora, the 56-year-old’s fungus-themed 10th album, carries echoes of those past lives, even as she sinks her toes into combustible new ground in the form of reggaeton beats, endearingly goofy bass clarinet honks, and barrages of mutant gabber, courtesy of the Indonesian duo Gabber Modus Operandi. And as her influence has bubbled over into the popular consciousness, she has spent the 21st century staking out new pop vanguards as both a songwriter and producer, concocting playful, knotty, sometimes punishing beats to gird her ancient melodies and inventive orchestrations. These records electrified pop music, pouring fizzy sherbet into the water in which modern artists swim Björk’s devotees range from SZA to Caroline Polachek, Rosalía to Radiohead. After those eccentric records sold 3 million copies apiece, she composed an Icelandic opus of snow-swept strings and geological beats-1997’s colossal Homogenic-only to reinvent herself again, on 2001’s Vespertine, as a beatmaker and sotto voce sensualist enveloped in womb-like electronics. Several of those clips came from her first two proper solo albums, 1993’s Debut and 1995’s Post, which introduced her explosive voice to the masses, via music largely drawn from the UK dance underground. That video was one of many in the 1990s and early 2000s in which Björk somersaulted onto MTV-and into pop at large-like a performance artist occupying a shopping mall. Her seat-of-the-pants wielding of the brawny SUV recalls the delightfully strange video for her 1995 hit “Army of Me,” which starred Björk as a scrappy militant up to no good in a similarly monstrous truck. Though Björk is a vocal advocate for ecological radicalism, the gas guzzler holds her affections hostage, so effortlessly does it command Iceland’s treacherous terrain. She recites tales of truculent volcanoes and viking exploits in a tone that is captivatingly banal-half nerdy school-trip guide, half Arctic Zeus in front of the bedroom mirror, rehearsing a TED Talk on thunder.Īs the Land Rover growls through the valleys, each bend and bump scatters black dirt around the foot mats, mingling with assorted hair bands, candy wrappers, and soccer trading cards left behind by a friend’s son. The paragon of experimental pop is proving a predictably magical tour guide, sprinkling the black brooks and lava plains with her Old Norse stardust. Behind black shades, her swept-pastel eyeliner conjures an air of the carnivalesque. In patchwork tights and a layered red dress full of gaping oval cutouts, she mechanically licks her lips and scrunches her features, as if behind her face were a factory of pipes and pistons to generate her industrial brainpower. Well, it’s a very Icelandic thing : It was our mountain that caused the French Revolution.”ījörk’s voice is a little husky, but she is as effervescent as ever. “That volcano over there,” she says, pointing through a mountain pass, “one of its most famous eruptions caused the crops in France to get destroyed, and people say that’s why the French Revolution happened. Back in lane, she slides off her coat and casually resumes her ode to her island nation. “Cheeky cheeky !” she trills, nearly demolishing a roadside post. Wrinkling her nose, Björk eyes a tight opening ahead and stamps the throttle to perform a perilous passing maneuver. ![]() The unexpected obstacle presents a chance for a spot of mischief. Rumbling down a two-lane highway in her hefty white Land Rover, Björk is chatting away in meandering tribute to Iceland’s volcanic landscape when a digger truck lumbers into view. ![]()
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