Army of Me: The sonic evolution of Björk

The year is 1993: spring is giving way to the first rays of summer, and a 27-year-old Björk is being interviewed in her London flat. Fresh from a move from Reykjavík with her six-year-old son in tow, the following weeks will see her debut solo album make its entrance into the world. “I just had to do it,” she said in a 1993 interview with i-D of moving to London to record Debut. “I’d had these songs in me since I was a little kid, and I knew that I might submerse this creative impulse forever.”  

Speaking in absolutes, for Björk, Debut’s release was about more than just the beginning of her solo career in earnest – a hugely significant event in and of itself. It was about making the conscious choice to honour the creative impulse that possessed her – of choosing to take her desire seriously and follow it wherever it may lead. It was her own existential make-or-break moment. It paid off.

Almost three decades later, Björk’s tenth album, Fossora, has been released into a radically changed musical landscape – one which Björk herself over the course of her career has played a large role in evolving. There are few artists that have had the longevity, influence, and creative evolutions Björk has had. Then again, there are few artists like Björk.

Debut, Post and Homogenic (1993-97)

In certain ways Debut was Björk’s most ‘orthodox’ album – yet even while her most accessible work, it broke boundaries, introducing new possibilities for what pop music could be. House music beats inspired by the clubs in Manchester she frequented acted as conduit throughout, while sitar, tabla and Bollywood-influenced string arrangements contrasted with raw vocals on tracks like Venus as a Boy. 

Two years on, 1995 saw the release of Post, which was, in a lot of ways, Debut with more intensity: more overt, more brash, more loud: and saw Björk come into her own as an artist. “Maybe you could say that Debut was London but Post was more a little bit Manchester, a little bit Scotland, a little bit Bristol,” Björk reflected earlier this year. “It was not so slick.” 

Post saw Björk begin to incorporate heavier techno influences alongside house, while the lyrical content reflected a deeper sense of agency. Where in Debut, Björk muses over Human Behaviour (the track itself was written in her teenage years) with bemusement, Post sees Björk open with a warning: ‘If you complain once more / You’ll meet an army of me’.

It's this side of Björk that we see channelled in 1997’s Homogenic, which saw Björk take on her sharpest creative evolution thus far in her career: beginning her journey into more conceptual ways of working. “With Homogenic, I just decided not to please anybody except myself,” she said upon its release in an interview with Mojo. Despite this, Homogenic was critically acclaimed, credited for pioneering the blend of art-pop with electronica.

Aiming to capture her native Iceland – “Earthquakes, snowstorms, rain, ice, volcanic eruptions, geysers … But on the other hand, Iceland is incredibly modern; everything is hi-tech", as she said in Oor magazine in 1997. "That contradiction is also on Homogenic” – the resulting sound was stark, dramatic, and poised in turn. 

The conceptualism of this album also represented a new era of playing with a more conceptual visual identity for Björk – her music videos in this era range from her taking the form of a polar bear to channelling a robot humanism – an early nod to the avant-garde visuals which would form the latter basis of her career. 

Vespertine, Medúlla and Volta (2001-07)

With 2001’s Vespertine, Björk shapeshifted once more, creating what she referred to as an “introverted, quiet winter record” in contrast to the crashing drama of Homogenic past. It’s an accurate evaluation. Incorporating electronica into haunting classical chamber music, once more Björk straddled the lines between genres, creating something deeply elemental and, at times, spiritually transcendent.

For Björk, the album represented a turn into the internal, as opposed to external world: “It’s about the universe inside every person,” she explained. “This time around, I wanted to make sure that the scenery of the songs is not like a mountain or a city or outside, it’s inside, so it’s very internal.” In many ways, Vespertine’s ‘introverted’ simplicity both sits neatly alongside, and completely contrasts with her 2004 offering, Medúlla.

Where all of Björk’s previous albums were forthright in their utilisation of electronic sound production to evoke a range of sound – even the most ‘minimalist’ of songs in her catalogue to date featuring a diverse range of instrumentation – Medúlla strips this away entirely, with sound constructed almost entirely a capella through layered human vocals: Inuit throat singing, to London and Icelandic choirs, to even beatboxing. The result is a flowingly intimate, rich tapestry of soundscapes. Though recorded across 18 locations – from Reykjavík to Marbella, New York to the Chateau Marmont – the album came together in an organic way, with the majority recorded between bedrooms and hotel rooms, in stolen spaces of time. 

Then, three years on from Medúlla, Björk took a sharp left turn with 2007’s Volta. In a break away from the ‘seriousness’ and minimalistic former two albums, with Volta Björk’s mission was to throw herself into something joyful: “All I wanted to do for this album was just to have fun and do something that was full-bodied,” she told Pitchfork in 2007. With bombastic, brassy instrumentation and drawing from a dizzyingly eclectic range of musical stylings from across the globe – Chinese music to Malian folk music; percussive tribal music to ambient and industrial stylings – the album leans into fun and chaos, yet every choice made was deliberate; Björk’s ability to pick out commonalities between seemingly disparate styles is on full display here. 

Biophilia, Vulnicura, Utopia (2011-17)  

Potentially her most experimental album to date, with 2011 came Biophilia. Minimalistic sonically and maximalist in visuals, scope and ambition, the electronic soundscapes of Biophilia explored interconnections between music, nature and technology. 

Björk commissioned the creation of new musical instruments specifically for the album – a gravity pendulum harp provides harmonies on Solstice. Elsewhere, she innovated with form – breaking the typical 4/4 time signature, such as on track Moon, where she utilised a 17/8 time signature to mirror phases of the moon during the lunar cycle. This marked the beginning of an album as a multidimensional, immersive project for her.

Starkly contrasting the cerebrality of Biophilia, 2015’s Vulnicura dealt with the most universal emotion of all: heartbreak. Her most personal piece of work to date, this album emerged from what Björk at the time referred to as the “most painful thing I have ever experienced in my life” (the album chronicles the breakdown of her relationship with ex-partner Matthew Barney). Describing the process of creating the album as “performing surgery on yourself”, complex, heart-pulling string arrangements (“I decided to become a violin nerd”) run throughout the album’s core, evoking pure, heartbreaking emotional depth. 

Strings give way to flutes on 2017’s Utopia, which saw the artist team up with Arca to produce what was in some ways the reversal of Vulnicura: here healing is complete, with Utopia a celebration of blissful joy – of an imagined possible utopia in which nature sits alongside technology, co-existing harmoniously. In many ways it pulls together the themes that have run through Björk’s musical career: bringing together her love affair with electronic sound with the stark beauty of nature, showing that these need not sit poles apart. “This album is supposed to be like an idea, a suggestion, a proposal of the world we could live in,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. 

Fossora (2022) 

If Utopia was about reimagining what could be, Fossora is about sinking into the soil of what already is. Continuing onwards into the ecological themes that have preoccupied her past three outputs, Fossora explores themes of survival, death and ecological meditation: it is a love letter to physicality and being. Sonically it draws closest to 2007’s Volta – clashing bass and clarinet pulsate, punctuated by raw vocal melodies. 

It is clear throughout her near 30-year solo career, Björk has covered much ground – defying genre, convention, and subverting expectation time and time again. Yet through her constant creative evolution, one thing has remained unwavering throughout: to this day, she continues to honour that same creative impulse that drove her all those years back. 

In a recent interview with The Guardian she said: “As a singer-songwriter, my role is to express the journey of my body or my soul. Hopefully I’ll do that 'til I’m 85.”

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Fossora is out now via One Little Independent Records

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