Björk has unveiled details of her first album in five years in a new interview with The Guardian. The project is titled Fossora (Latin for “digger”) and is expected to be released this fall. Björk’s children Sindri and Ísadóra sing on the album, as does serpentwithfeet, while the Indonesian group Gabber Modus Operandi is also featured.
Writes journalist Chal Ravens of Fossora, “on the cover, she is a glowing forest sprite, her fingertips fusing with the fantastic fungi under her hooves. Compared with the cloudy electronics of 2017’s Utopia, it is organic and spacious, earthbound rather than dreamy, and filled with warmth and breath. It is also a world of contrasts: the album’s two lodestones are bass clarinet and violent outbursts of gabber. There are moments of astonishing virtuosity and bewildering complexity and, like much of her recent music, a resistance to easy melody.”
Two songs are inspired by the 2018 death of Bjork’s mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, while Gabber Modus Operandi injects a hardcore techno vibe into the album. Elsewhere, Fossora sports a sextet of bass clarinets, which Bjork says she wanted to sound “like Public Enemy, like duh-duh-duh-duh, like boxing.”
Fossora is the follow-up to 2017’s Utopia, which was nominated for the best alternative album Grammy. Bjork has been fairly active on the road this year after having not toured since 2019, and will play three shows in South America in November as part of Primavera Sound’s expansion to the region.
“As a singer-songwriter, my role is to express the journey of my body or my soul,” Bjork wrote on Twitter today. “Hopefully I’ll do that till I’m 85.”
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