Album Review: Björk’s ‘Fossora’ Grounds and Connects Us

For many manic pixie dream queers, Björk is a queen mother type of figure. “Cocoon,” off of her 2001 album “Vespertine,” is a good example of why — it’s the kind of soft, sonically gorgeous expression of unfettered desire that is rarely conveyed through music. Set against whispers and echoing clicks, Björk’s voice seems to sing directly from an embodied space of utopian queer longing: “Who would have known / That a boy like him / After sharing my core / Would stay going nowhere?”

Her discography can be difficult to crack at times. Her earlier works are more accessible — her first album “Debut” released in 1993 and its 1995 follow-up, “Post,” stick closer to familiar pop structures, though they also simultaneously subvert them at every turn. Since then, Björk’s sound has been unplaceable; while their 2004 album “Medulla” is almost entirely a cappella, “Vulnicura,” from 2015, features 10-minute divorce ballads with skull-crushing bass breaks.

In comparison, “Fossora,” Björk’s 10th studio album, sounds like it should be played at a rave of woodland creatures, thrown beneath a giant mossy toadstool. Björk has referred to it as her “mushroom album,” and this holds true, not only in terms of song titles (“Mycelium,” “Fungal City”) but thematically. Across its ten tracks, “Fossora” gives new shape to death, metabolizing grief into something nurturing and at times, even hallucinogenic.

“Fossora” is Björk’s first album after her mother’s passing in 2018, an event that comes through in detail in the back-to-back tracks “Sorrowful Soil” and “Ancestress.” The latter, one of the most emotionally powerful songs on the album, conjures a complex, contradictory late mother-daughter relationship over a gong and gorgeous string plucks: “Her once vibrant rebellion is fading / I am her hope-keeper.”

The biological theme of the album comes through in different ways on “Atopos,” the album’s first single and opener, whose lyrics are inspired by Barthes’s theory of “the unclassifiable Other,” and whose steady clip of bass clarinet honks and eventual devolution into a massively punchy gabber beat ushers techno into the still too-narrow scope of what can be considered “nature music.” The beat in question is in part thanks to Kasimyn, one-half of the Indonesian hardcore duo Gabber Modus Operandi, whom Björk cites as influential in conceptualizing the album.

Set partially against a backdrop of what can be described as “garden gnome music” (a statement made in total adulation, of course), the thrumming factor of “Fossora” is conspicuous; some listeners may be put off by its contrast to the easier beauty of the album’s classical instrumentalization. The existence of title track “Fossora,” the album’s most brain-melting song, testifies to this tension — which is precisely what makes the album’s sound so special. In the context of much of the world shaking itself back to life as Covid-19 restrictions loosen, it’s hard not to read “Fossora” as a timely call to action, a call — convincing, if contradictory — to get outside and rave, not despite our messy, heavy emotions, but because of them.

Music lovers should all be thankful for Björk. In a time when patient, mindful art-making is succumbing to the TikTok content-churning machine, listeners should treasure the fact that she still has the means (and the guts) to dedicate time, effort, and emotional labor to a cohesive project. (She has been releasing albums for 34 years.) Björk’s offerings of lush music videos with stunning set and costume design, camped-out album art, and even behind-the-scenes snippets of her creative process, in the context of the state of popular music today, feel more and more like gifts to the attentive listener.

There’s another moment toward the end of “Ancestress” that holds a special power. The lyric goes: “Nature wrote this psalm / It expands this realm.” Björk (our illustrious queen mother of word-warping) bisects the monosyllable of “realm,” pronouncing it “re-alm.” It fits the rhyme, sure, but the action of this halving (or doubling) creates a nexus for new meaning. Björk’s music, her life’s work, could be taken to be the “alm” here, as in giving alms — the fruit of her immense compassion, of her dogged optimism and desire to connect. The “alm” is “re,” is repetitive because it re-fills the shape of something lost, whether that be to sickness or to bereavement. “Fossora” emerges after a period of pandemic-driven isolation to re-emphasize and revitalize the connections we had all along but didn’t sufficiently treasure. It sprouts from barren ground to return us to our ever-changing Earth, a planet whose soil will one day hold us all, whose creative energy is all but infinite, and whose thin crust still, impossibly, supports our jumping, raving, stomping feet.