Björk has revealed that her first album since 2017's Utopia is called Fossora and set to arrive this fall in an interview with Chal Ravens for The Guardian. It features serpentwithfeet and backing vocals from Björk's son Sindri and daughter Ísadóra, as well as Indonesian dance duo Gabber Modus Operandi. Chal writes:
Her new album is called Fossora, the feminine version of the Latin word for digger. 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. Björk’s journey from 90s dance-pop to something more like surreal opera has more in common with Scott Walker’s graceful trajectory than those of 90s peers such as PJ Harvey.
[…] This earthiness is trowelled by the album’s sextet of bass clarinets, an instrument chosen not for its gloominess, as in Mahler’s 6th Symphony, nor its smoky luxury, like Bennie Maupin’s playing on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, but for its potential as percussive artillery. Björk wanted them to sound “like Public Enemy, like duh-duh-duh-duh, like boxing”, she chirps, before squatting in demonstration of the metre-long instrument’s heavyweight attack.
Then there is the hard techno. On heavy rotation at Björk’s living room parties were Gabber Modus Operandi, two Indonesian punks who alloy folk styles such as Balinese gamelan with abrasive western gabber, footwork and noise. “They’re taking tradition into the 21st century, which I really respect. They do it like nobody else,” Björk says.
Björk also revealed that the album was partially inspired by grief and that two of the songs are tributes to her late mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, who passed away in 2018. Read more at The Guardian.
Notable Releases of the Week (8/19)
Andrew Broder releasing the soundtrack for Alan Moore’s ‘The Show’ (listen to “Herbert”)
Our favorite songs of the week (playlist)
33 New Songs Out Today
Björk, Jeff Tweedy, Waxahatchee, Stephin Merrit & more to share new work in podcast ‘Listening’
Watch a playlist of every video MTV’s ‘120 Minutes’ showed
