- Critic score
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- By date
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Jan 28, 2015The result is Björk’s most frighteningly intimate album to date.
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Jan 27, 2015Great art takes pain and turns it into something that can help us heal. Vulnicura does exactly that.
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Jan 30, 2015Vulnicura is humanity at its most volatilely sublime.
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Jan 23, 2015Vulnicura is a harsh and demanding album, one to sink into with a good set of headphones. But it’s also Björk’s most--if not first-- personal record.
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Jan 23, 2015Vulnicura is smooth and whole, even as its singer lies shattered.
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MagnetMar 12, 2015There's a candor here that hasn't always touched the Icelandic singer/composer's electro-dreamscape output. [No. 118, p.52]
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UncutMar 5, 2015Far greater than the sum of it's parts, Vulnicura can be a challenge but, once immersed, it's hard to tear yourself away. [Apr 2015, p.85]
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Feb 2, 2015Björk’s most fully realised, accessible record in years.
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Jan 27, 2015Vulnicura is a well-crafted antithesis musically and thematically, resulting in the most compelling effort she has put forth in years.
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Jan 27, 2015Vulnicura honors her pain and the necessary path through and away from loss with some of her bravest, most challenging, and most engaging music.
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Jan 22, 2015Vulnicura feels, overall, as if it is one of Björk’s most successful albums, one where she mostly finds sonic strategies that are well matched with her concepts and themes.
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Jan 22, 2015Vulnicura is a serious, heavy journey through a rough ordeal, a work certainly too deep to fully absorb so quickly after its release. Like many of her recent records, it's not toe-tapping beat-based music. But fans like myself will find much to love as we explore its many peaks and valleys.
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Jan 22, 2015As the songwriter and coproducer (primarily working with Venezuelan-U.K. DJ Arca, who has teamed with FKA Twigs and Kanye West), Bjork is in peak form, creating a thematic and sonically linked work that flows seamlessly from track to track.
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Feb 3, 2015Vulnicura marks a bold return for such a storied singer.
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Jan 29, 2015Some tracks, like "Mouth Mantra," simply feel overcrowded. The Haxan Cloak, who mixed the album, struggles to find clarity in busier moments. But the story, visceral and tragic, transcends these imperfections in the telling.
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Jan 23, 2015It’s simultaneously her most mature feat of arranging and almost psychosomatically affecting.
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Jan 28, 2015Vulnicura manages the most fundamental motivation of art; it turns the trauma and humiliation of personal struggle into something beautiful. But as much as it is laden with the narrative of her personal journey, it is musically a return to form.
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Jan 22, 2015The musical moments that capture Björk’s heartbreak are frequently stunning on Vulnicura, but the whole thing is a little shy on hooks and reasons to take the grueling journey with her often. And that’s what keeps it from being her Yeezus: The heartbreak makes it powerful, but also difficult to enjoy.
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Apr 3, 2015One of the most remarkable albums of an inimitable career.
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MojoMar 19, 2015Despite their meticulous craft, these songs don't feel like curated artefacts--they feel raw, unquiet, still moving. Vulnicura might tell an old story, but it still feels new. [Apr 2015, p.87]
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The WireMar 11, 2015A self-consciously serious, elaborate, capital R Romantic dramatic statement that pulls no punches, more Greek tragedy than break-up album. [Mar 2015, p.55]
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Q MagazineMar 5, 2015A strange, intoxicating and utterly brave record. [Apr 2015, p.86]
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Feb 4, 2015Dense to the extreme, a thick fog of emotions that concedes nothing, this is as uncompromising and potentially definitive as a break-up album could ever be.
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Jan 29, 2015These nine ballads are stripped to essentials--beats, strings, stirring vocals --full of beautiful and eerie contrasts that highlight Björk's loneliness, anger and fleeting moments of optimism.
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Jan 27, 2015If Björk’s last two albums were impersonal voyages of artistic license and collaboration, Vulnicura is deeply personal and so much more rewarding for it.
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Jan 26, 2015Heavy, but engrossing.
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Jan 26, 2015Vulnicura is emotionally bare and, as a result, remarkably complex, demanding of an active listener, but it’s also one of Björk’s most poetic records in a long career. It also rewards those who join her on her emotional journey.
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Jan 26, 2015Break-up albums aren’t particularly groundbreaking or unprecedented these days, but somehow she has crafted one that seems uniquely sincere.
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Jan 26, 2015After a decade of diving deep into the abstract, Björk's now more grounded and human than ever, thanks to the two most unfathomable ideas of them all: love and heartache.
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Jan 23, 2015Whatever informed it, this may be the most heart-rending music she's ever made.
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Jan 22, 2015It’s not an easy listen, but a brave, beautiful and affecting album--an attempt to find order in chaos that, as she wishes for it, offers a “crutch” to the heartbroken.
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Jan 22, 2015The really great thing about this heavy, intense album, as punishing as it is beautiful in its resolve, is that it shakes to the core the philosophies that Björk laid out so methodically on Biophilia, but she still finds a dark difficult way back to hope and love.
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Jan 22, 2015Like all Björk albums before it, Vulnicura is the work of many but the vessel, really, for the voice--and everything that means--of just one persistently empowering talent.
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Jan 22, 2015You could say there’s something gimlet-eyed about a woman who realises her relationship is collapsing and automatically thinks: still, great material. But it’s nothing if not honest. And besides, on the evidence of Vulnicura, she has a point.
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Jan 21, 2015Even amid the most abstruse music, these songs have an emotional immediacy. The physicality of Björk’s voice and the strings are even more striking against the impersonal electronic sounds, all the better to reveal the interior landscape of heartbreak and healing--not a simple story, and all the better for it.
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Jan 21, 2015After the wild beach party of 2007’s Volta and the shiny wonders of 2011’s Biophilia, Vulnicura is a windswept trek of a record. But one which gradually repays its difficulties with the raw exhilaration of survival.
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Jan 26, 2015By coming back down to terra firma to detail her disconnection with love, Björk reconnects with the people of Earth.
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Mar 6, 2015Bjork's ninth studio album is the first to deal with such dismal and personal details, and is her most revealing as a result--through lyricism as well as through songwriting.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 564 out of 619
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Mixed: 14 out of 619
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Negative: 41 out of 619
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Jan 20, 2015
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Jan 22, 2015
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Jan 22, 2015