Bjork contemplates familial roles

No way around it: “Fossora,” Bjork’s 10th studio album, can be heavy-going, thorny and intense. But it’s well-worth an effort.

“Fossora” continues the songwriter, producer and multimedia visionary’s lifelong project of linking personal experience to larger natural and cosmic processes — to place herself in the universe and the universe within herself. It arrives five years after “Utopia,” a determinedly airy album featuring the sounds of birds and flutes. “Utopia” was a deliberate, gravity-defying rebound and contrast to Bjork’s wounded, heartsick, string-laden 2015 album, “Vulnicura,” and “Fossora” is yet another self-conscious change of elemental direction.

“Fossora,” derived from the Latin for “digger,” prizes earthiness: the fleshy physicality of life and death, pleasure and suffering, romantic and parental love. To ground the music, Bjork’s new tracks often feature lowregister instruments such as bass clarinets and trombones.

Bjork’s production and arrangements on “Fossora” present her at her most unapologetically abstruse: closer to contemporary chamber music than to pop, rock or dance music. Her melodies, as always, are bold and declarative, and delivered with passion and suspense. But on “Fossora,” Bjork doesn’t necessarily center those melodies as the hooks they could be. And although she collaborates on some tracks with electronic producers Gabber Modus Operandi, she’s not aiming for dance floor beats.

In her new songs, the tempos often fluctuate organically, like breathing. And more than ever, Bjork places her voice within a teeming musical ecosystem that’s likely to include a tangle of instrumental polyphony and layered vocals, with every element insisting on multiplicity.

The songs on “Fossora” encompass mourning, self-assessment and hardwon connection and renewal. “Obstacles are just teaching us/ So we can just merge even deeper,” Bjork declares in “Ovule,” a consideration of personal and digital togetherness.

For much of the album, Bjork, 56, contemplates the 2018 death of her mother, Hildur Runa Hauksdottir, and her own generational roles as a child and a mother. (Bjork’s children, Sindri and Isadora, appear among the album’s backing vocals.) In “Sorrowful Soil,” Bjork summons overlapping, antiphonal choirs for a prismatic yet coolly scientific consideration of motherhood: “In a woman’s life, she gets 400 eggs but only two or three nests.” It’s followed by “Ancestress,” with gamelanlike gongs and a string ensemble shadowing Bjork’s vocal lines as she recalls moments of her mother’s life and death: “The machine of her breathed all night while she rested/ and then it didn’t.”

But the album also recognizes obstinate, essential life forces: love, hope and — as a biological analogue — subterranean fungal growth.

The album’s graphics and the video for its opening song, “Atopos” (from the Greek for “out of place” or “unusual”), are full of mushroom imagery, and the title song of “Fossora” — an unlikely merger of neoclassical Stravinsky-like woodwinds, ricocheting vocals, and sporadic and then brutal electronic thumps — boasts, “For millions of years we’ve been ejecting our spores.” In “Fungal City,” amid tendrils of clarinet countermelodies and pizzicato strings, Bjork exults in a new romance, singing, “His vibrant optimism happens to be my faith too.”

That optimism is by no means naive. In “Victimhood,” the album’s darkest sonorities — six bass clarinets huffing and growling their lowest tones over an impassive ticktock beat — accompany and nearly engulf Bjork’s vocals as she struggles with shattered expectations and longs for perspective: “I took one for the team/ I sacrificed myself to save us,” she sings. But she’s trying to “heed a call out of victimhood,” and she finds it as the song ends. Then celebratory flutes greet her in “Allow,” a paean to nurturing as healing: “Allow allow allow you to grow,” she sings. “Allow me to grow.”

The album concludes with “Her Mother’s House,” an abstract nearlullaby that envisions children’s rooms as chambers of a mother’s heart. It intertwines the multitracked voices of Bjork and her daughter, singing, “The more I love you, the better you will survive.” They find an evolutionary purpose in an emotional bond.

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

‘Fossora’ Bjork (One Little Independent)