Song You Need: Welcome back, Björk
The Icelandic icon’s return is brimming with the radical vulnerability that’s made her one of the most compelling artists of the past 30 years.
The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.
Björk is back, and her timing couldn’t be better. Who but Ms. Guðmundsdóttir could return to a world so fundamentally broken and unflinchingly cruel with the same wide-eyed vulnerability she brought to her global Debut nearly 30 years ago? It’s the same radical openness that’s made her one of the most compelling — and complicated — artists operating in her lifetime, sharing eight uniquely wonderful solo studio LPs in the interim, as well as a vast body of collaborative and audiovisual work.
Read Next: Björk still has her finger on the pulse
In the spirit of total honesty and direct communication, the Icelandic luminary shared plans late last month for a career-spanning podcast exploring “the textures, timbres and emotional landscapes” of each of her albums in chronological order. (The first three episodes — on Debut, Post, and Homogenic, arrived September 1 and the fourth, on Vespertine, drops Thursday.) The news came a week after she announced Fossora, her first new full-length since 2017’s Utopia, due out September 30 via One Little Independent Records. Its theme is “mushroom life,” and she’s described it as “a pacifist, idealistic album with flutes and synths and birds,” all of which will accompany Serpentwithfeet, Indonesian dance duo Gabber Modus Operandi, and Björk’s two children on the record’s guest list.
She’s now shared that record’s lead single, “Atopos,” featuring GMO’s DJ Kasimyn, who is credited with “beats” and as a co-writer, while Björk is listed as the song’s sole producer. “[It’s a] good intro .... kinda like Fossora´s passport,” she wrote in a tweet announcing the track’s release. “Sonically a heavy bottom-ended bass world. We have 6 bass clarinets, punchy sub drilling, nesting and digging us into the ground.”
“The lyrics are inspired by what [French literary theorist] roland barthes described as the unclassifiable OTHER,” she added later. “‘our differences are irrelevant. our union is stronger than us.’”
Sonically, the song is an emphatic return to form, with the aforementioned bass clarinet sextet facilitating a groove that sounds like a celestial tango conducted by Astor Piazzola’s astral projection at Jabba the Hutt’s palace. The track devolves into a heavy techno remix of itself in its final 40 seconds, completing the mind fuck.
Lyrically, it’s maybe not as deep as all that: “Are these not just excuses to not connect? / Our differences are irrelevant / To insist on absolute justice at all times / It blocks connection,” sounds a lot like the losing end of a Twitter argument, and the shroominess of it all is a bit on the nose. “Hope is a muscle” is a good line, though.
Where the fungal imagery fails in abstract, though, it delivers tenfold in the track’s Viðar Logi-directed video, in which Björk appears as two different types of fauna in an eerie cave full of mushrooms, both human (the clarinetists) and decorative. Its final, clubby passage is illustrated with a rare Björk fist-pumping sequence that’s worth the price of entry on its own. Watch it above.
