macho sensibilities of rock and, for that matter, rock critics, with their unmasked disdain for musicians like Bush, whose attention to domestic detail—Björk mentions a negative review of Bush’s 2005 song “Mrs. Bartolozzi,” about clothes erotically spinning in a washing machine—makes them somehow “third class.” “It was OK,” she says, disgusted, “to write huge reviews about bands that were singing about tits and beer,” but “the inner life of the woman, the everyday life of a woman, was a lesser . . . art form.”

Whatever its themes, Fossora sounds pretty much like any other record Björk has made in the last two decades: it is neo-baroque electronica with a shade of rock opera. It distinguishes itself in being more emotionally dynamic, less eager to go for broke on every song. Tracks like “Victimhood” encourage us to interpret this musical circumspection as the result of some sustained soulsearching. (“Fossora” is a feminization of the Latin word fossor, or digger.) Here Björk tells herself to “step out of victimhood” and assume a “bird’seye view” that allows her to see even the most painful moments of life as ordinary and endurable. The song’s lugubrious soundscape, structured by the complaint of clarinets and an oboe, suggests a mood that is fading, and fade it does. The last fifty seconds are a cappella, Björk punctuating her own gentle humming with the sound of her voice reaching for the same handful of pitches over and over again, as if practicing her scales.

“Scale” might be a metaphor for the record as a whole. Fossora is interested in tacking between experiences of different size and articulating them in forms of different size. One song is less than one minute long; others stretch to seven. Some, like “Mycelia,” are performed by a one-woman band, just Björk and a software program; others are a grand affair, with ensembles of string and wind instruments led by the young Icelandic conductor Ragenheiður Ingunn Jóhannsdóttir. On “Allow,” Björk movingly exposes the frailty of her otherwise redoubtable voice in the upper registers, eventually letting it take a back seat to the crisper tones of singer Emilie Nicolas, who accompanies her. “Allow, allow, allow,” their voices rustle, “Allow me to grow.”

The most notable thing about Fossora, however, is that unlike Björk’s last several albums, it contains a masterpiece. The showstopping “Ancestress” is a eulogy for Björk’s mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, an environmental activist who died in 2018. The verses shift gracefully between remembrance—“When I was a girl, she sang for me”—and vigil, as Björk describes doctors implanting a pacemaker into Hildur’s body and her mother’s loss of “manners” as she nears the end of life:

The machine of her breathed all

night

While she rested

Revealed her resilience

And then it didn’t

You see with your own eyes

But hear with your mother’s

This is hard stuff but the song’s giant architecture holds it, the way that our social ceremonies of grieving—wakes, funerals, memorial services—help measure and give shape to the always unfinished ordeal of loss. “Ancestress” feels ancient, primal. Clocking in at a solemn sixtyseven beats per minute, it is also improbably catchy, rising and falling with a kaleidoscopic regularity that recalls medieval plainchant. Björk’s voice is sometimes alone, sometimes joined by that of her adult son, Sindri Eldon, as bells toll, strings sigh, and computers crunch numbers into sounds. “Did you punish us for leaving?” Björk asks, “Are you sure we hurt you?” Here is a genuine tribute and powerful catharsis, at once honest, sad, and replete with love.

Despite being the sort of musician who collaborates compulsively—she’s worked with Tricky, Timbaland, the electronic duo Matmos, and the harpist Zeena Parkins, to name just a very few—Björk, who is fifty-six, will probably always be thought of as an auteur, a slightly isolated whiz kid whose work is in thrall to some private, interior meaning. “Ancestress,” with its achingly personal subject matter, is as great as it is because it satisfies the desire for collective emotional experience in a way that only Björk’s first few albums, with their lighthearted, even disposable rhythms, really do. It’s a small step, perhaps, between the dance floor and the deathbed, but that’s no tragedy.