BJORK Vinilo y CD

Review: The tenth studio album by Bjork, released in early 2023, hears the Icelandic singer include increasingly conceptual approaches to making music, a trend which has continued at least since the mid-point of her career at large. Fossora is a concept album about the life cycle of fungi, exploring themes of decay, regeneration, symbiosis and transformation. With cameos from El Guincho and Arca, as well as vocal contributions from Sindri Eldon, isadora Bjarkardottir Barney and the Hamrahlid Choir, it's an ethereal, organic-surreal foray into darkroot gardens and moonlit quasi-fungal butterflies, and the perfect follow-up to the album released five years prior, Utopia.

Review: "Another Bjork album?!" cry the naysayers. But little do they know they've been duped into thinking the Icelandic legend's last full-length, Utopia, was a recent affair. Actually, it's already been a good five years since the singer's flowery flabbergaster, and collab with experimentalists Arca and Doon Kanda, came to be. Fossora, by contrast, is a much more mournful LP: it's a meditation on generations, and was in part inspired by the death of Bjork's mother. It also contains collaborations with her two children, Sindri and isadora. A homelier affair, revisiting Bjork's upbringing in Iceland, on which she hadn't reflected on record since she was 16.