Björk turns fifty this year, which means she can now claim back her winter fuel payments, get cheaper travel insurance, and apply for free off-peak local bus travel in certain parts of England.But Björk isn’t going to do that. Mainly because she can’t feel temperature and she flies everywhere, but also because she’ll be busy putting out her ninth studio album; reflecting on a career that has resulted in more stark psychedelic teachings and beautiful fucked-up-ness than Black Friday on Silk Road.
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So, how can you even begin to predict what a new album from Bjork will sound like when she deals in everything from big band to ambient IDM and straight up invents instruments?We’ve collected all the information, theories, rumours and jokes into one cohesive mess, so that you can channel all your bubbling Björkcitement into an optimistic idea of what exactly this forthcoming album in March is all about.
THE TITLE IS A MADE UP WORD
Vulnicura, which - much like Biophilia, Homogenic, Vespertine and Volta before it - is a very “Björk” album title in that it comprises a singular mysterious-sounding word that nobody has ever heard or spoken until now. Introduced by any other musician, it would be safe to assume they made it up completely just to be enigmatic. But, because it’s Björk and she is operating on a higher plane to the rest of us, “Vulnicura” is definitely loaded with an otherworldly meaning and power that we lesser forms couldn’t even hope to understand. Alternatively, it sounds like it could be a treatment for thrush. Logically, the internet thinks it is a horse drug or magic spell.
SHE’S ANNOUNCED THE TRACKLIST
"Stonemilker", "Lionsong", "History of Touches", "Black Lake", "Family", "Notget", "Atom Dance", "Mouth Mantra", and "Quicksand", revealed the Nordic banshee in a handwritten letter to fans. Loaded with abstract concepts and existentially provocative vocabulary, this could easily be interpreted out of context as the shortlist of potential titles for Kate Bush's autobiography, Naboo the Enigma's shopping itinerary, or a series of sexts sent from Werner Herzog to Mother Nature.
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EVERYONE INVOLVED IS AMAZING
In the last few weeks she’s revealed that Arca is heavily involved, as is The Haxan Cloak, a songwriter called John Flynn, pop producer Chris Elms and the prolific sound engineer Mandy Parnell. In fact, our own loudmouth and inconsistent sources at Noisey UK have whispered that Robin Carolan - lord of Tri Angle Records and champion of such artists as Evian Christ, SD Laika, Forest Swords, Holy Other, and more - is the executive producer for this Björk record, and assisting her with production decisions. Everything he touches usually becomes gilded with a veil of impenetrable and viscous cool, so all signs point to excellent.
IT MIGHT NOT BE AS DARK AS PEOPLE ARE SUGGESTING
Agreed, The Haxan Cloak might be the type of drone producer you’d expect to find holding a noose and a dildo in the darkrooms at Berghain, but Arca isn’t as electronically impersonal a musician as everyone is making out. Yes, he makes his music using “computers”, and yes, his work with FKA Twigs and Yeezy sounded like Robocop’s dirtiest slowjams, but he’s a multi-dimensional musician with a visceral way of thinking, as proved by his debut album Xen which juxtaposed confessional and aggressive mania with moments of absolutely blissful wanderlust (see: “Held Apart”, “Wound”, “Sisters”). He balances love and hate like a true millennial philosopher, so we shouldn’t see his name and assume Vulnicura will be all distorted kickdrums and satanic synths. It could easily be all blossoming Disklavier and organic strings and bleeps, siring a sound more tender than a veal’s butt cheek.
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THERE IS A THEORY ABOUT HOW BJORK AND RADIOHEAD ALBUMS MIRROR EACH OTHER
2015 won’t be the first time Bjork and Radiohead have released albums in the same year. Or the second. Not even the third. In fact, Bjork and Radiohead have released all of their respective albums in the same year, with Hail To The Thief and Medulla being the only exceptions. It’s a relatively interesting theory - considering they have released sixteen albums between them - that becomes even more alluring when you compare their career paths. As writes our Reddit theorist:
All of this quite clearly suggests that not only could the themes of the Bjork album tell us something about Radiohead’s, but almost certainly that Bjork and Thom Yorke are actually a solitary hermaphrodite virtuoso called Thom Bjorke.
SHE’S BEEN PLANTING HER FLAGS OF APPROVAL ALL OVER THE PLACE
Weird and interesting sounds are like flypaper for Björk, for whom working within the confines of existing instruments was considered too limiting when writing Biophilia, so she commissioned a load of her own new inventions including a “Gravity Pendulum Harp”, which is exactly what it sounds like, and a “Sharpsichord”, which looks like a solar-powered gramophone and sounds like this.Her music taste over the last twelve months has been gloriously unpredictable. She appeared on Death Grips’ final album The Powers That B, and has also been spotted at gigs from new sonic upstarts like Mykki Blanco, GFOTY and Danny L Harle.
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As well as being a verified human dreamcatcher, her brain is like malfunctioning software that takes in lots of clear-cut information, processes it, and spits it back out in a completely glitch-fucked but utterly amazing way. Now that PC Music has gone in there, who knows what’ll come out, but I’m pretty confident she’s going to invent at least eight entirely new sounds.
BASED ON WHAT WE NOW KNOW, THIS SEEMS TO BE THE ONLY RATIONAL RESPONSE
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In the last few weeks she’s revealed that Arca is heavily involved, as is The Haxan Cloak, a songwriter called John Flynn, pop producer Chris Elms and the prolific sound engineer Mandy Parnell. In fact, our own loudmouth and inconsistent sources at Noisey UK have whispered that Robin Carolan - lord of Tri Angle Records and champion of such artists as Evian Christ, SD Laika, Forest Swords, Holy Other, and more - is the executive producer for this Björk record, and assisting her with production decisions. Everything he touches usually becomes gilded with a veil of impenetrable and viscous cool, so all signs point to excellent.
All of this quite clearly suggests that not only could the themes of the Bjork album tell us something about Radiohead’s, but almost certainly that Bjork and Thom Yorke are actually a solitary hermaphrodite virtuoso called Thom Bjorke.
