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Every Björk Album Ranked, from Debut to Fossora

We ranked all 10 of the Icelandic singer's studio albums, from 1993's Debut to 2022's Fossora.

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Björk
Photo: Vidar Logi

Björk began her musical career performing cute Broadway cabaret music in Icelandic and achieved international fame singing with art-rock band the Sugarcubes. She reached superstardom with a series of increasingly loopy but gorgeous electronic-pop solo albums that proved she’s not only a memorably deliberate vocalist, but also something of a precocious songwriter with a love for mixing analog and digital instruments into one heady brew.

By the late 1990s, Björk dropped the violently happy house party aesthetic of Debut and Post and began favoring the serious, the poetic, and the melodramatic, resulting in the titanic 808 Philharmonic masterpiece Homogenic and the deceptive, darkly sex-obsessed Vespertine. Eventually, she lost the plot and lurched into inaccessibility with albums like 2004’s Medúlla, which buries a few brilliant compositions among muddy a cappella art-fuckery, and 2011’s heady Biophilia.

Björk’s latest act has yielded a trilogy of critically acclaimed releases—the wrenching breakup album Vulnicura, the more reconciliatory Utopia, and the recent Fossora—that have moved the artist away from the conceptual and toward something resembling the personal. It’s a reminder that, for Björk, music has never been merely an outlet for her avant-garde impulses, but an essential mode of survival. Eric Henderson

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on June 8, 2020.

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Medulla

10. Medúlla (2004)

By the turn of the 21st century, Björk’s albums had become progressively more progressive, stretching the boundaries of both contemporary pop and electronic music, challenging the way we hear words and melodies. Medúlla, the title of which references the inner core of certain organs or body structures (the essence of things, if you will), found Björk forsaking customary electronic instrumentation for human beatboxing, whistling, sighing, grunting, and hyperventilating. The effect can be awe-inspiring, most readily on “The Pleasure Is All Mine” and “Who Is It (Carry My Joy on the Left Carry My Pain on the Right).” Human voices sub for bass, horns, snare, and synthesizers on the house confection “Triumph of a Heart,” while the Icelandic and London Choirs fill in for the grandiose orchestral arrangements of past albums. But for all of the questions Medúlla raises about how we perceive music, the cacophonous multivocality of tracks like the meandering “Ancestors” are ultimately more exhausting than enlightening. Sal Cinquemani



Volta

9. Volta (2007)

You can imagine the roar of relief that accompanied early reports that Björk’s Volta would find her emerging from her increasingly hermetic cocoon and declare that’s there’s more to life than deliberately defying expectations. The album’s first single, “Earth Invaders,” recalls “Human Behavior” and “Army of Me” but gurgles with a more straightforward marching tempo, squelching acid synthesizer lines, and a snapping high hat. “Declare Independence” begins like an outtake from Telegram and grows in amplitude and hysteria until it almost eclipses “Pluto.” Two of the album’s most galvanizing moments—the ominously rolling dirge “Vertebrae by Vertebrae” and the volcanically expansive “Wanderlust”—envelop Björk completely within the emotional landscapes of “Jóga.” But none of it is much fun, even abstractly. In the album’s two collaborations with Antony Hegarty, Björk finally found a vocal sparring partner whose voice is as much, if not more, an acquired taste than her own. Brave? Sure. Good? Not so much. The seven minutes of cooing and over-crisp enunciation on “Dull Flame of Desire” are enough to send just about anyone bounding for their “Venus as a Boy” maxi-single. Henderson



Fossora

8. Fossora (2022)

Any appropriations of familiar music forms on Fossora are, at best, fleeting. Björk’s compositional sense is as unbound as ever, her songs amoeba-like organisms transfiguring from one second to the next across the album, in line with a logic that’s defiantly hers alone. Fossora (a made-up feminization of the Latin word for “dig”) is her fungal album, which means not just toadstools and psychedelics, but the thoughts and feelings that begin to creep in when you’re rooted in place. Where the album missteps is in how it pulls all of its disparate musical influences together. Whittling down its ambitions might have produced a more cohesive set, but it bursts with evocative lyrical interpretations of the world around us, with pioneering sonic juxtapositions and tangible emotional stakes. Sam C. Mac


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Utopia

7. Utopia (2017)

Stretching past the 70-minute mark, the sprawling Utopia offers a sensory experience adorned with flutes and harps and propelled into sublime rapture by the Icelandic singer-songwriter’s intimate, otherworldly vocal in songs that appear alien at first blush but, upon repeated listens, convey profound truths that seem plucked from a collective field of consciousness. “Blissing Me” finds Björk reveling in the thrill of infatuation, describing a new lover as someone whom she kisses with her “whole mouth,” even as she maintains enough self-awareness to wonder, “Did I just fall in love with love?” And yet, in her euphoria, she doesn’t completely abandon the darker side of romance. The painful breakup—from partner Matthew Barney—that informed Vulnicura, manifests again on “Sue Me,” where she insists that no amount of legal wrangling and melodramatic discord should come before their daughter, a sentiment echoed on “Tabula Rasa,” in which she demands children break free from the “fuckups of the fathers,” a prescient notion for an era that’s at last reckoning with toxic masculinity. Josh Goller



Vulnicura

6. Vulnicura (2015)

Let’s be honest: Björk, more than any chanteuse, needs no tangible catalyst to trigger emotive seizures in song form. She’s felt violently happy about the backs of men’s freshly shaven necks, imagined herself a girl-shaped fountain of blood, promised a volcano eruption just below your aeroplane simply so you would know that some day you’ll blossom. Losing the man whose dick once inspired an entire album of the porniest Christmas music ever penned? Well, you may as well go ahead and strap some LED lederhosen onto the Tsar Bomba. If you ever wanted Björk to get close to a human, the raw hurt at the heart of Vulnicura gives you the motherlode. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed, disoriented, ashamed. It wasn’t just her best album in ages, but her most shockingly unfiltered. Henderson



Biophilia

5. Biophilia (2011)

By 2011, the free spirit who introduced herself on Debut had aged into a prickly, smart, and severe performer who didn’t mind coming off as pretentious in the pursuit of her art. And Björk’s seventh album, Biophilia, works best when it eschews pop altogether, instead forging into dark, minimalist territory that’s occasionally reminiscent of Steve Reich. “Thunderbolt,” “Dark Matter,” and “Hollow” comes closest to establishing a sonic identity as rich as that of Homogenic or Medúlla. On “Hollow,” the organ skitters around wildly like a carnie’s calliope, suggesting Tom Waits in space, before Björk and her backup choir engage in some freaky harmonic singing about DNA. One of the kōans on “Thunderbolt” is “universal intimacy,” and that’s not a bad description of the album’s aesthetic, which combines Vespertine’s chilly skin contact with the reverent, even religious, invocations of Medúlla. Matthew Cole

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Debut

4. Debut (1993)

While the U.K. press ate it up, American critics, perhaps still beating off to the U.S.’s exalted alt-rock movement, were divided on Björk’s Debut. Though the album contains a healthy mix of trip-hop and jazz-pop, dance music dominates, a marked departure for the former Sugarcube. While the ballads don’t measure up to those on Post or Homogenic, dance singles like “Violently Happy” and “Big Time Sensuality” (found here in its original, more mainstream house-y incarnation) truly defined the “Björk sound.” The album is Björk’s most accessible to date, which is ironic considering one song includes over half a minute of the singer repeating “b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-baby” and another that was recorded in a bathroom stall. By titling the album Debut, Björk was acknowledging that it was simply a rehearsal for her forthcoming masterpieces, but even if she never recorded again, Debut was enough to cement her legacy as one of pop’s most forward-thinking performers. Cinquemani



Vespertine

3. Vespertine (2001)

Vespertine finds everyone’s favorite shrieker barely rising above a whisper. Backed by subtle clicks and bloops from Matmos and some elegantly unobtrusive strings, Björk sings the praises of solitude, monogamy, and quiet days at home—all topics that would seem out of character if they weren’t brightened by her uniquely glamorous oddness. On the wonderful closer “Unison,” Björk claims she “thrives best hermit style/With a beard and a pipe/And a parrot on each side” before sweetly confessing that she “can’t do this without you,” in a moment representative of the album’s innovation and loveliness. Jimmy Newlin



Post

2. Post (1995)

Björk’s second album, Post, was designed as a mixtape of communiqués to friends and family from the singer after she migrated from Iceland to Europe: “Army of Me,” a kick in the pants to her little brother; “Enjoy,” a love letter to London; “Possibly Maybe,” a farewell to ex-boyfriend Stéphane Sednaoui; “Cover Me,” a message to producer Nellee Hooper (“This is really dangerous…but worth all the effort”); “Headphones,” a Stockhausen-inspired electronic tone poem dedicated to 808 State’s Graham Massey. From the industrial-strength “Army of Me” to the lush and cinematic “Isobel” to the eccentric big-band cover “It’s Oh So Quiet” (which, if not for brass arrangements on songs like “I Miss You” and “Enjoy,” would sound completely out of place here), Post is Björk’s most scatterbrained work to date, but it’s tied together flawlessly by the singer’s singular whimsicality. Cinquemani


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Homogenic

1. Homogenic (1997)

If Björk’s Post flattered the decade’s penchant for eclecticism, Homogenic snapped all the trends of the ’90s into sharp focus even as it widened the scope with fin de siècle zeal. The Icelandic siren’s “emotional landscapes” have never been more volcanically formidable (“I’m a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl”), more self-effacingly wry (“I thought I could organize freedom/How Scandinavian of me!”), or more happily violent (“I’ll heal you with a razor blade”). And her music has never been as confident, inquisitive, or uncompromising as it is here—realized with the considerable assistance of LFO’s Mark Bell. All traces of “shhh, shhh” pastiche have been silenced in favor of neo-classical glowstick chamber music, and the album’s build from the stabbing warpath of “Hunter” and the tolling majesty of “Unravel” (soul sister to Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves) to the celestial beauty of “All Is Full of Love” works with the unity of a great concerto. It’s no exaggeration to muse that the century of Schoenberg, Debussy, and Prokofiev culminated in Homogenic. Henderson

1 Comment

  1. “There’s more to life than deliberately defying expectations.”

    The irony is just too much at this point.

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