Each music video for Björk’s 2015 album Vulnicura featured the Icelandic artist on camera alone. Through her use of virtual reality, you were beside her as she crawled out of a cave and danced at dawn lakeside; you swirled inside her mouth or moved into her sherbert-neon computer-generated body. It was intimate to see and feel her isolation, her heartbreak, and ultimately her healing as she sewed up a wound in her chest and walked away. The final statement of Vulnicura’s sweeping narrative about ending a relationship with her longtime partner was that after all this, Björk was finally alone.
It’s easier to create a utopia in isolation. If only we didn’t have this misbegotten, biologic desire to welcome someone else into our world. Another person? With me right now? I’m good, thanks. Yet most of us persist in this welcoming, an act that requires so much patience, compassion, and sacrifice because we believe that by co-organizing a perfect world for two, we might come closer to knowing love. Add to this small world a child and it seems like a miracle—a small paradise immune to the horrors outside of it. “If you feel this world is not heading the right way,” Björk said recently, “you have to be DIY and make a little fortress.” It’s within this matriarchal frame that Björk and her co-producer Alejandro Ghersi (aka Arca) created the challenging album Utopia. It’s a long, skittering discovery of googly-eyed romance, a rebuke of the violence inherited by men, and a generous offering of love song after love song, rendered musically with unerring elegance and passion.
The four decades of Björk’s music can be seen, simply enough, as a long trek to detail every last tendril of spiritual energy and spark of emotion that has existed in the world. Her relationship to feeling is particularly spatial, living within environments built Björk-tough for all the screams and whispers of history: emotional landscapes, hidden places, internal nebulas, mutual coordinates. Her shift from avant-garde pop star to immersive multimedia artist is not brand-building in a career sense—rather, it’s in service of having more tools for this restless excavation of human senses, their origins and futures. If this seems high-minded, it’s because it is, but it’s also because Björk’s music now exists on ever grander musical staffs, her lingua franca is that which is rarely broached in casual conversation: How does it really feel to lose someone? How does it really feel to start loving again?
The former was the focus of Vulnicura, a breakup album of strings and electric thuds that grounded her music for many listeners. But a crater of loss is easier to describe than the feeling that might begin to fill it, and accordingly, a denser fog hovers over the music of Utopia. “How to capture all this love?” she sings on the near 10-minute epic “Body Memory.” She knows it’s not easy, “like threading an ocean through a needle.” Her first single “The Gate” is a good starting point, though, the crossroads between old heartbreak and new wonderment. The chest wound she repaired becomes the “gate” through which this new love enters. Groups of flutes and synths zoom from one side of the song to the other, unconcerned with sub-basement beat gurgling beneath, or Björk savoring every consonant from elongated s’s to trilled r’s.
Utopia is Björk’s flute album much the way the darkly intimate Vespertine leaned on the celeste or Medúlla was composed mostly of human voices, or Volta had brass and Biophilia its choirs. But Utopia is, more accurately, an album of breath and wind. After a few plucks of harp on the first two songs—the arresting banquet of “Arisen My Senses” and the gentle touch of “Blissing Me”—Utopia lives almost entirely suspended in the air. Its orchestration is carried by a small flute ensemble, the Icelandic Hamrahlid Choir, Harmonic Whirlies, and a collection of birdsongs culled both from Iceland and Arca’s homeland of Venezuela. The arrangement on the album flits and flutters everywhere, hard to grasp, much like modern classical composer Olivier Messiaen’s serialist compositions or even his ones composed to mimic birdsong. All throughout the album we hear the singing of birds called the Montezuma Oropendola—the one that sounds like a Moog synth in a microwave—and the Musician Wren, whose call is one of a few birds that sings in melodies similar to human music. We hear all this breath rushing through metal, wood, plastic, cartilage, and muscle, all in largely minor, dissonant modes. At 72 minutes, this is the longest studio album of her career. Björk doesn’t find love with three chords and the truth, she finds love through an endless interrogation of every note there is.
Accompanying this airy, grandiose mood are, thankfully, a few moments of levity. At one point she offers that she is “Googling ‘love’”—a dizzying and delightful image—and she gets legit pissed off at how beautiful nature is: “This fucking mist/These cliffs are just showing off.” If the first half of Utopia crawls through the brambles of welcoming someone new, exchanging mp3s, warming the heart “on this log fire of love,” the second half reckons with a world that can’t fully support it. The pain of Vulnicura turns white-hot on “Sue Me,” a kiss-off to her ex-partner Matthew Barney who, in 2015, did sue her for custody of their child. It relies heavily on the bodily percussion of Arca, a martial kick drum whose provenance is closer to a battering ram on a dungeon door than Pro Tools.
The traumas of Björk’s past—affairs and “fuck-ups” are plainly stated on Utopia—are not used as a weapon so much as they become symbols of an impossibly broken system. She sings that “he took it from his father/Who took it from his father/Who took it from his father.” As ever, Björk becomes a hunter for the origins of her emotions and a ward for their future. “Let’s break this curse/So it won’t fall on our daughter,” she sings, “And her daughter/And her daughter/Or let this sink into her DNA.” She places all these words in her mezzo register, pushing them out from the bottom of her lungs.
A close collaborator of Björk’s, the singer ANOHNI (along with artists Kembra Pfahler, Johanna Constantine, Bianca Casady, and Sierra Casady) once etched into marble slabs 13 tenets of “Future Feminism” as part of an exhibition of the same name. The tenets are radical commandments crucial to reconstructing a better future driven by women and their care for the earth. It’s as if, by the end of the record, Björk descends from the mount with these tablets in arms for her final three songs. Here the fog of Utopia begins to clear, flutes uncluster, modes turn major, and Arca’s threshing abates. Not since the chorus of “Jóga” has such a feeling of release and catharsis come over a Björk record.
This feeling pours into “Future Forever,” the final track, one of the finest songs of Björk’s career. She sings: “See this possible future and be in it/Hold fast for love, forever.” What glowing simplicity her words now possess. They are irreducible in their meaning, like on “Tabula Rasa” when she sings this to her daughter: “My deepest wish is that you’re immersed in grace and dignity.” There is no image or metaphor underneath, just emotional mass. Björk’s lyrics have become the anvil that forges her voice and the music around it. They may arc and bend in odd new ways, but that text is unshakable. You take her at her word.
So when Björk finally describes her utopia, it already feels etched in marble. “Future Forever” has no flutes or electronics, just a synth organ, spare and holy. After the restlessness of the album, it floats in stasis. In it is an intimate and perfect world of matriarchal domes and musical scaffolding. She summons the love she has tried to describe, that ocean through a needle. “Now you mirror at me,” Björk sings at the end, “Who I used to be/What I gave to the world, you’ve given back at me.” The greatest love songs are measured by the depth from which they surface. If these words in Utopia seem unfathomable, a bit much, a little too real, perhaps it’s because our imperfect world was not built to support it. Björk’s utopia begins with someone else, and so does ours.
