Björk

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Essential Albums

  • Vespertine
    Vespertine
    Vespertine

    Released in 2001, Vespertine is the sound of Björk in love. It was written and recorded as the singer was tumbling head-first into a relationship with her future long-term partner, the conceptual artist Matthew Barney. Along the way, she found the shimmering sonic treasures of Vespertine. But for all its romantic moments, this is also an album born out of pain. Vespertine got underway during production on Danish provocateur Lars Von Trier’s bleak 2000 musical melodrama, Dancer in the Dark. Björk served as the film’s lead actor, and also composed songs for the soundtrack (which were eventually released on her album Selmasongs). Dancer in the Dark was met with critical acclaim—with Björk even receiving an Oscar nod for the song “I’ve Seen It All”. But the filming process itself proved harrowing. During that fraught time on the set, a fictional character named Vespertine—whom Björk later described as a “lady in waiting, hibernating in winter”—became a sort of refuge for the Icelandic songstress, and helped inspire the 12 tracks found here. Björk envisioned Vespertine as a response to the extroverted, more nature-based qualities of 1997’s Homogenic—a headphones-and-laptop opus explicitly made for the dawning age of Napster. To bring Vespertine to life, she enlisted a stable of collaborators, including The Notwist alum Martin Gretschmann—aka Console—as well as the experimental duo Matmos. Together, they came up with a suite of songs rife with whispery vocals, found sounds and sonic moments that Björk fondly dubbed “microbeats”—all of it designed not to sound compromised when downloaded online. The result is a multidimensional wonder. On Vespertine, the low-end orchestral swirl of “Hidden Place” tips into the sparse, delicate clatter of the sexually explicit “Cocoon”. Meanwhile, the harp-kissed “It’s Not Up to You” and the glimmering “Aurora” play with different sides of glitchy, slow-burn balladry. But there’s perhaps no purer distillation of the artist’s muse—and of Björk’s romantic state of mind—than Vespertine’s cathedral-like centrepiece, “Pagan Poetry”, what with its ecstatic, guileless refrain: “I love him, I love him, I love him, I love him.”

  • Homogenic
    Homogenic
    Homogenic

    “I’m the hunter/I’ll bring back the goods,” Björk intones on Homogenic’s spooky, skittering opener. In fact, the Icelandic superstar’s third album would prove to be one of the most highly regarded releases of her career, a rippling tapestry of techno innovation and orchestral songcraft. The urgency of the lyrics here are no mistake: The singer had been deeply affected by a string of personal incidents, including the highly publicised suicide of a stalker who had attempted to assassinate her with a letter bomb, and the exhaustion of an extensive tour for her previous album, Post. That tension manifests on tracks like the towering, string-laden “Bachelorette”—“I’m a fountain of blood/In the shape of a girl”—and siren-like ballad “Jóga”, with its urgent couplets about emotional rescue and states of emergency. Recorded almost entirely at the home studio of her tour drummer Trevor Morais in Málaga, Spain, Homogenic also marked Björk’s departure from Post and Debut producer Nellee Hooper. In his place, collaborators including Scottish DJ Howie B, British producer Guy Sigsworth (Madonna, Britney Spears) and LFO’s Mark Bell stepped in. (Bell in particular became integral to the production, and would go on to work with her on over half a dozen albums until his untimely death at age 43 in 2014.) The album soon found fans all over: Thom Yorke famously called “Unravel” “one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard”—he performed a reverent cover with Radiohead in 2007—and legendary fashion designer Alexander McQueen signed on to direct the music video for “Alarm Call”, reportedly with so much enthusiasm that he provided a 100-page treatment detailing his ideas. Few moments in Björk’s remarkable visual arsenal, though, can match Chris Cunningham’s robot-romance video for glimmering closer “All Is Full of Love”. It’s now considered a modern classic, as is the whole of Homogenic: an unforgettable melding of electronic and organic artistry, sung in the key of strange.

  • Post
    Post
    Post

    It’s fitting, perhaps, that Björk blossoms into technicolour on the cover of 1995’s Post. If her 1993 debut album, Debut, introduced the world to Iceland’s most famous future export, Post finds in her full bloom. It’s a no-skips collection, one so richly realised—and so radically melodic—it seems to usher in an entirely new era of sound. Indeed, Post contains multitudes—perhaps most literally on the electrifying low-slung opening track, “Army of Me”, with its percussive stomp and menacing refrain (“And if you complain once more/You’ll meet an army of me”). But if Björk had become her own cavalry, she could also serve as a high priestess of pure feeling, as on the simmering “Hyperballad”, with its stark dreamlike imagery of cliffs and crashing objects. In many ways, Post offers an extant portrait of Björk’s life as an expat in 1990s London, where she was heavily influenced by the fertile underground scenes exploding in England, from Manchester to Bristol. Reuniting with Debut producer Nellee Hooper, Björk conscripted several other well-sourced Brits to join her in the studio, including Graham Massey of 808 State, as well as Tricky, the visionary Massive Attack alum who’d recently found stand-alone stardom of his own. Notably, Post marks the era in which Björk began to emerge as one of the formative video artists of the era. Her joyful cover of the brassy 1951 Betty Hutton B-side “It’s Oh So Quiet” was turned into a surreal, Busby Berkeley-like extravaganza by its director—a little-known skate-brat named Spike Jonze. And French filmmaker Michel Gondry created eerie pastoral landscapes in the video for the gorgeous “Isobel”. With or without visuals though, Post stands alone as its own indelible document—a heady art-pop smörgåsbord that remains as vital, urgent and fantastically genre-free as it was upon release.

  • Debut
    Debut
    Debut

    You could say that Björk Guðmundsdóttir was born twice: First in Reykjavik in 1965—and again in the studio in 1993, thanks to her aptly titled solo Debut. By the early 1990s, Björk had been a staple of Iceland’s alternative-music scene for more than a decade, thanks to her work with several scrappy local bands, as well as her time with The Sugarcubes, the co-ed quintet that shot to international fame thanks to its 1988 hit “Birthday”—a song all but defined by Björk’s inimitable breathless vocals. But none of that earlier work prepared listeners for Debut—an album that belongs within another solar system entirely. It’s a strange and singular piece of work, one that seemed to emerge fully formed from Björk’s deep creative wellspring. Indeed, as a guide to the next few decades of Björk’s career, there could hardly be lyrics more fitting than those on Debut’s opening track, the galloping, frost-tipped hit “Human Behaviour”: “And there is no map/And a compass wouldn’t help at all.” Armed with years’ worth of song sketches—including a few compositions she’d started while still in her teens—Björk passed through several early collaborators on Debut before opting to work with British producer Nellee Hooper, who’d recently helped make hits for Sinéad O’Connor and Soul II Soul. The result is a dance-floor outlier threaded through with brightly syncopated beats and global-citizen flourishes. “Venus as a Boy” sways to an unhurried, almost tropical rhythm, while “Big Time Sensuality” finds its joyful backbone in rubber-band electro-funk. The lovestruck ballad “Come to Me”, meanwhile, shivers with woozy longing and ice-crystal orchestration. Still, even in the midst of Debut’s constant tonal shifts and switchbacks, certain anomalies stand alone: “Like Someone In Love”, for instance, is a stripped-down, fairly faithful cover of a standard first made popular by Bing Crosby in 1945. And the album’s closing track, “The Anchor Song”, is strung together with little more than mournful horns and plaintive vocals. But, in their own ways, each track here serves as a signpost of where Björk would go in the years ahead, illuminating a path forward for this unparalleled and forever unpredictable artistic force.

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About Björk

There are multihyphenates—and then there is Björk: singer, producer, songwriter, actor, technologist, environmentalist and more. Her voice may be her most immediately recognisable attribute, yet the broad sweep of her career has produced something more like a total fusion of art and life. Born Björk Guðmundsdóttir in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1965, she grew up in a commune and recorded her solo debut at 11 before cycling through a succession of bands, culminating with alt-pop upstarts The Sugarcubes. Her adult solo career began in 1993 when boundaries between sounds and disciplines were rapidly eroding; she made the most of that freedom, mixing pop, electronic and the avant-garde into a multimedia whirlwind that has only accelerated over the years. She has collaborated with figures as distinct as ROSALÍA and Sir David Attenborough; been celebrated in a MoMA retrospective; and even starred in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. Through it all, she’s released some of the most indelible hits of her era—and some of its most challenging anti-pop, too.

BORN
21 November 1965
GENRE
Electronic

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