Björk has announced that she will be releasing a new album, her tenth, this fall. The revelation comes via a wide-ranging interview in The Guardian. The album will be called Fossora, “the feminine version of the Latin word for digger,” and anchored by the two “lodestones” of bass clarinet and gabber, a style of Dutch techno that came out of The Netherlands in the 90s.
Interviewer Chal Ravens describes Fossora as a reaction to 2017’s Utopia and says the album features “moments of astonishing virtuosity and bewildering complexity, and, like much of her recent music, a resistance to easy melody.”
The new album is, in a way, a product of the COVID and the space and time that lockdown gave Björk to explore and develop new songs and sounds. But it’s also reflective of “a transitional time,” in the singer’s life, says Ravens, with songs that in one instance, honour the passing of her mother and in another, serve as a kind of farewell to her youngest child, Ísadóra, who recently moved out of her home. (Both Ísadóra and Björk’s son Sindri provide backing vocals on that track, called “Her Mother’s House.”)
There will be a fantastical quality to Fossora, Björk explained, but also an earthiness. “Let’s see what it’s like when you walk into this fantasy and, you know, have a lunch and fart and do normal things, like meet your friends,” she said to Ravens, while also describing Fossora in an email to the Indonesian duo of Gabber Modus Operandi as her “mushroom album.”
“It’s like digging a hole in the ground,” she wrote to the pair. “This time, I’m living with moles and really grounding myself.”
Fossora will be out on One Little Independent Records this fall. Read Björk’s full interview in The Guardian here.
