In Love Letter to Optimism, Björk Finds New Hope
What comes after heartbreak? For Björk, it’s “a love letter to enthusiasm and optimism,” she said.
Björk’s darkly formidable 2015 album, “Vulnicura,” reflected the end of her decade-long relationship with the artist Matthew Barney in songs of nearly paralyzing pain and simmering anger, weighted with dissonant, dramatic strings.
But her new album, “Utopia,” prizes airiness: the breath that powers voices and flutes; the atmosphere where birds fly; structures and tempos that change freely rather than being locked to a beat.
“Utopia” is the latest iteration of Björk’s fascination with how nature and technology can interact. While making it, she read extensively about utopias: in academic studies and in stories and novels through the centuries, from ancient fables to the science fiction of Octavia E. Butler.
“Utopia has gone from everything being monasteries, to feminist islands, to socialism, to ‘Peach Blossom Spring,’ ” she said, referring to a tale of an idyllic community that was written in the fifth century in China.
The 2016 election of Donald J. Trump only strengthened Björk’s determination to envision hope. “If optimism ever was like an emergency, it’s now,” she said. “Instead of moaning and becoming really angry, we need to actually come up with suggestions of what the world we want to live in, in the future, could be. This album is supposed to be like an idea, a suggestion, a proposal of the world we could live in.”
Björk’s proposal involves “that feeling, post-Trump, when everything’s gone horribly wrong,” she said. “You escape to an island, and there’s a lot of women there with children, and everybody’s playing flutes, and everybody’s naked, and there’s all these plants you’ve never seen before and all these birds you’ve never heard before, and orchids, and it has that feeling of pioneering into a new world.”
Björk, 51, played a nearly finished version of the album for me in July during one of her brief stays in New York City. (She has since been to London, to her home in Iceland, and on tour to Moscow, Buenos Aires and Tbilisi, juggling concerts with her band, gigs as a disc jockey and curating Björk Digital, a traveling exhibition of her virtual-reality videos.)
“I started thinking about this album as a city in the clouds,” she said. “It doesn’t have gravity. It’s more like floating in the air.”
Like “Vulnicura,” the new album barely resembles music for pop radio playlists. It’s often dense and disorienting. The songs are akin to chamber music and to the electronic experimentation of Björk’s collaborator throughout the album, the electronic musician Arca (Alejandro Ghersi), who grew up on Björk’s music.
Arca joined Björk partway through the making of “Vulnicura” and toured with her amid his own solo efforts.
While Björk’s many previous co-producers have been enlisted to help execute her ideas, “Utopia” is closer to a full partnership.
“What was different was that me and Alejandro were merging,” Björk said. “We felt like we could write 50 albums, because it was so fun. At first we were really surprised because the generational gap is pretty large between us, and then we figured out that philosophically, we share a lot of things. And there’s an optimistic and a celebrational element in both of our music that we really like.”
The hinge between “Vulnicura” and “Utopia” is “The Gate,” which Björk has released as the new album’s first single. She sings about the healing of the chest wound she showed on the cover of “Vulnicura,” and its turning into a gateway for love, as the song rises to a fervent refrain: “I care for you, care for you.”
There’s still some lingering resentment and sorrow in songs like the defiant “Sue Me” and “Tabula Rasa,” and broader thoughts of solace in “Loss,” an elegiac melody strafed by a frenetic beat.
But Björk wanted the album to look ahead. She said,“‘Vulnicura’ was the end of a chapter, and this is the beginning of a new chapter.”