Fossora

On this soul-nourishing tour de force, her one-of-a-kind mix of innovation and emotion is as inspiring as it's ever been over her decades-long career.

It’s a very buoyant creation - perhaps her most levitous release since Debut - that concerns itself with ancestry and legacy.

Fossora is an incredible and vulnerable project that refuses any easy categorisation. Björk’s dives into sonic obfuscation have never once eclipsed her refusal to be anything except open-hearted and honest. Her power is in how she allows herself to feel and let these emotions guide her artistic expression.

With her 10th album, Fossora, she is grounded back on earth, searching for hope in death, mushrooms, and matriarchy, and finding it in bass clarinet and gabber beats.

Not an easy listen - as one might expect - but definitely a rich, rewarding one.

Oddly charming, goblincore aesthetic, one that capitalises on Björk’s unique strengths: the arrangements on Fossora are among the most complex and lavish of her career. [Nov 2022, p.58]

As with all Björk albums there’s a lot to unpack and it requires several listens before it all begins to fall into place but, once done, there’s a case to be made for this possibly being the best Björk album (and certainly the most animated) since 2011’s Biophilia certainly in terms of breadth, aesthetic and overall engagement.

It feels strange yet familiar, rather comforting and welcoming while also showing the artist being peacefully exalted about it. Some will need a tunneling machine to get to them, and some other will do with a spoon, but there's treasure to be found in the heart of Fossora, and if willpower is not enough to help you find them, mushrooms will surely help.

Trilling flutes and whimsical clarinets break the mood of majestic ache that makes Fossora one of Björk’s hardest-hitting albums.

“Fossora” doesn’t aim to be a crowd-pleaser. It’s hard to imagine these studio phantasms onstage (though Björk may well find a way). But Björk’s interior worlds are vast.

If I may make up a word of my own, it is utterly bjorkers, and all you can do is dig it.

It's an album of rich multifaceted complexity that showcases what a truly inimitable artist Björk is. [Nov 2022, p.24]

It's heavy stuff, but reliably gorgeous musically. [Nov 2022, p.82]

To hear someone so comfortable in their own creative process, binding the childhood inquisitiveness that’s never left them to the artistic confidence that they’ve developed over more than three decades, is a delight and a privilege.

An album of reinfatuation and reaffirmation, ‘Fossora’ is invigorating in its drive, if there’s little of real surprise here; hard as the mushroom-gabber beats are, if you’ve heard Pluto or Mutual Core, you won’t be shocked.

Despite the occasional challenge of big blasts of (gleefully disruptive) discord on tracks such as “trolle-gabba”, those considering dipping a toe into avant garde pop will find the waters are warm on Fossora. Give it time – it’ll grow on you. Like a fungus.

Like any such grand project, it's daring and indulgent, occasionally weighed down by its own pretence, and the result is several songs on the album that seem to unspool in no direction in particular. But that unwinding is usually gripping, and like the other two albums Björk's recent renaissance—Utopia and Vulnicura—Fossora stuns more often than it doesn't.

In short, it’s Björk at her absolute Björkiest.

Aggression doesn’t fully return until nine tracks later on the aptly named instrumental “Trolla Gabba,” and then again on the back half of the title track. These explosions are among the album’s most riveting moments, but you have to clear the muck before you get to the fireworks. ... That effort eventually proves worthwhile: Many of the musical risks pay off once you get accustomed to the songs. And despite her occasional failures, Björk still illuminates enough of her story to remain compelling.