EVERY ALBUM Bjork produces resolves itself into a story. The story begins with the songs, the raw material through which Bjork channels emotion, autobiographical experience and philosophical ideas. The songs cohere into a universe. They take on colors, elements, an instrumental sound. They have a physical character, whom Bjork will portray on the album cover: the shy-girl songs of “Debut” as a virginal innocent in silver mohair; the volcanic beats of “Homogenic” as a patriotic warrior; the tribal rhythms and trumpets of “Volta” as a wanderer in electric blue, neon green and red.
The albums and their stories map the bifurcation of Bjork’s artistry. There is Bjork the musician, who creates her music in an emotional cocoon, tinkering with technologies, concepts and feelings; and Bjork the producer and curator, who seeks out collaborators to help her translate her work beyond sound, who has an unparalleled ability to disperse herself across a vast range of media. In the popular imagination, it is the latter vision of Bjork that spectacularly dominates: Bjork who has a gorilla for a dentist; Bjork in a pearly dress that she pierces into her skin; Bjork wearing a mask of spines. But it should be known that by the time these visions of Bjork reach us, even as they seem like dispatches from the future, they are snakeskins that Bjork has already shed. They are the stories that have coalesced, while she has continued on into the protean, the experimental and the unsung.
THE LONG SEAM between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates runs mostly under the Atlantic Ocean and surfaces in Iceland, in a national park called Thingvellir. Here, the plates inch apart above sea level, forming in their rift a deep and formidable lake, Thingvallavatn. A thousand years ago, the Vikings held their parliament here. It is near this place, on a snowy slope overlooking the water, that Bjork keeps a small cabin.
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As Bjork was emerging with a collection of songs from that difficult time, she was introduced to the work of Alejandro Ghersi, who records under the name Arca and has produced beats for Kanye West and the R&B singer FKA Twigs. Ghersi is 25 years old, from Venezuela and gay. Despite the variance in their biographies and their age difference, the two musicians quickly formed a deep creative connection. Bjork explains that in the Chinese astrological calendar they are both snakes, and therefore intuitive and prone to merging. But she also sees Arca, along with emerging artists like Mykki Blanco, Kelela and Le1f, as the newest branch of the music she has loved, a generation for whom she now figures as a matriarch.
Bjork might still be in a reclusive compositional phase of work were it not for Ghersi, who interrupted her normal process of slow curation. They drove to her cabin for an exploratory session under her reindeer antler chandelier, and Bjork was impressed by Ghersi’s efficiency as a producer. For “Vespertine” in 2001, Bjork had crafted most of her own beats, but the process had taken three years. “There’s no way I’m going to wallow in this self-pity for three years, forget it,” she said of her decision to finish the album as quickly as possible, to close this circle and move on to the next. Over the next year, she and Ghersi continued to meet, sometimes joined by the producer Bobby Krlic, who records as the Haxan Cloak. The work went quickly and, unusually for Bjork, the songs in “Vulnicura” appear mostly in the order in which they were written, like a series of diary entries.
I was lucky to meet Bjork at a moment when the story of her new album had not been set. She described the video for “Black Lake,” directed by Huang and influenced by Ingmar Bergman, as operatic in scale but also stark, centered on her voice and her performance. “Like a black-and-white psychology movie,” she said, and then laughed. “I don’t know why that was funny.” Huang told me of a wound motif, of a clip she had sent him of a spider molting, of the album’s thematic use of lilac and yellow.
For now, there is only the album itself. It is, I think, one of her best albums, intensely personal. String arrangements were prevalent on Bjork’s first four albums but they have been all but absent from her music for a long 10 years, swapped out for experiments with choirs, brass and beats. On this album, Bjork returns to strings, and the arrangements are the most complex she has composed. The intention was to create a solitary, psychological sound. “I used to say when I did ‘Homogenic’ that the strings are almost like your nervous system,” she said. “Like being played with a bow.”
