Björk

Fossora

Björk’s first album in five years “doesn’t aim to be a crowd-pleaser,” said Jon Pareles in

The New York Times. The Icelandic singersongwriter is at her most avant-garde here, hewing “closer to contemporary chamber music than to pop, rock, or dance music.” The often challenging record is “well worth an effort,” though, because “Björk’s interior worlds are vast.” Surrounding her voice with “a tangle of instrumental polyphony,” the 56-year-old mourns the 2018 death of her mother, contemplates her roles as a child and a mother, and ultimately finds hope in human interconnectedness. Don’t be deterred by “Atopos,” the clanging lead track, said Sam Rosenberg in Consequence. Beyond that opener, “Fossora is filled with Björk’s reliably lush instrumentation and poetic lyricism.” Her use of fungal imagery evokes cycles of death and renewal, a theme that’s driven home when her voice intertwines with her daughter’s on the final track. Where 2017’s Utopia promoted hope for a brighter future, this “frequently engrossing” record “revels in the flawed and fleeting beauty of the present.”