Fossora
| Bjork
Fossora
Fossora is the tenth studio album by Icelandic singer-musician Björk. It was released on 30 September 2022 through One Little Independent Records. The album was recorded mainly during the COVID-19 pandemic and centres around the theme of isolation, loss and grief, and mainly by the death of her mother, Hildur Runa Hauksdóttir, in 2018. Commercially, the album debuted at number 11 on the UK Albums Chart and at number 100 on the US Billboard 200. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
With her 10th album, Björk is grounded back on earth, searching for hope in death, mushrooms, and matriarchy, and finding it in bass clarinet and gabber beats.
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The Guardian
Less obviously, the exquisite Atopos finds Björk emphasising the importance of persevering with relationships; it also partially addresses her mother. The track captures the wonders of Fossora in miniature – hammering beats, a thicket of tense clarinets, and Björk’s unmistakable vocal in didactic mode, upfront and emphatic.
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The Washington Post
Her 10th album sounds as otherworldly as ever, but her music remains rooted in the fragile ecology we share.
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Slant Magazine
But while whittling down its ambitions might have produced a more cohesive set, Fossora bursts with evocative lyrical interpretations of the world around us, with pioneering sonic juxtapositions and tangible emotional stakes. It’s not hard to imagine—just as we can see the influence of Björk’s epochal ’90s albums in the likes of Rosalia and Grimes—a new generation of artists hunting in this eccentric mushroom kingdom for the grist of their own musical identities.
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Rolling Stone
Her latest is vast, challenging, and beautifully human.
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Beats Per Minute
Fossora is an incredible and vulnerable project that refuses any easy categorisation. Björk’s dives into sonic obfuscation have never once eclipsed her refusal to be anything except open-hearted and honest. Her power is in how she allows herself to feel and let these emotions guide her artistic expression. Yes, she is the woman who hybridised into a blue bear; yes, she is the woman who transported us to an alien planet of fauna and flutes; it doesn’t matter how fantastical the art or how otherworldly she seems, she has always remained inseparable from raw humanity.
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Epigram
As a huge lover of her earlier presence in The Sugarcubes, and her 90s albums Post and Debut, I wasn’t initially taken with the slower tempo of Fossora. Writing this review has made me realise that, like a puzzle, you have to solve and familiarise yourself with the chaos of Björk’s creation to fully embrace it, but sometimes working for something you wish to love isn’t always very fun (even for an English student). Despite this, her poetic lyricism and choreographed music videos are so complex it’s hard not to be awed. My favourite of Björk’s ambiguous lyrics is off ‘Ovule’, and captures the album’s exploration between natural life and technology; “A glass egg above us floating an oval ovule / In a dark blood-red void carries our digital selves embracing and kissing”.
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Consequence
Björk Is as Vibrant as Ever on the Moving, Earthy Fossora.
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Paste Magazine
On the Icelandic icon’s 10th album, intricately arranged songs of grief and love initially come off imposing, but gradually build a fascinating world.
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NME
The Icelandic icon's lockdown album was produced in a period of isolation and grief, but her tenth record retains its warmth and accessibility.
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Treblezine
Essaying comes easy with Fossora; it gently unweaves it from you, asks you to divest yourself of those thoughts, to share them with your mother. Not Björk; she too is sharing thoughts with her mother here. It is another, vaster thing, like prayer. What does this album mean? Ask me again in a year, in five years, in ten, in twenty. There will be thousands more words to write down. Björk erects mansions, labyrinths of glass and sand and mushroom and wallpaper and photographs from your childhood home. There is always more.
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RA
At times startling, floundering and epic, Fossora attempts to meld personal experience with the cosmos, to make experiences universal. Like any such grand project, it's daring and indulgent, occasionally weighed down by its own pretence, and the result is several songs on the album that seem to unspool in no direction in particular. But that unwinding is usually gripping, and like the other two albums Björk's recent renaissance—Utopia and Vulnicura—Fossora stuns more often than it doesn't.
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Loud and Quiet
Fossora is another stark shift for Björk. But at its root, it’s her ability to sing with sincerity that allows the songs to flourish.
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Clash Magazine
“Only bird’s eye view can help me transgress out of this hole” she sings on ‘Victimhood’, and there is no doubt that with ‘Fossora’, Björk is restating her individuality, thematically examining her place in the world as a 56-year old musician, whilst assuredly pushing sonic boundaries from neo-classical to industrial noise.
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The Harvard Crimson
“Fossora” emerges after a period of pandemic-driven isolation to re-emphasize and revitalize the connections we had all along but didn’t sufficiently treasure. It sprouts from barren ground to return us to our ever-changing Earth, a planet whose soil will one day hold us all, whose creative energy is all but infinite, and whose thin crust still, impossibly, supports our jumping, raving, stomping feet.
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AllMusic
Whether Björk presents a magical world on Fossora or just reminds listeners of the magic within everyday life and relationships, it's more proof that she can still forge a remarkable connection with her audience. On this soul-nourishing tour de force, her one-of-a-kind mix of innovation and emotion is as inspiring as it's ever been over her decades-long career.
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The Line of Best Fit
Every new Björk album is an intricate exercise in world building and on her tenth record Fossora it’s a place given life through adopting the mushroom as her totem. Its root-like structure – or mycelia – provides a through line for the album that manifests with surprising coherence, warmth and, above all, joy.
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DIY Magazine
Not an easy listen - as one might expect - but definitely a rich, rewarding one.
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Afterglow
Always on the cutting edge, and never a minute behind, Fossora proves that the pop legend continues to make headway for herself like a persistent growing mushroom on a dead log.
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Northern Transmissions
Fossora really encapsulates Björk’s growth as a musician. It doesn’t aim to be a well-loved record, but her worlds so are so incredibly fascinating.
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Spectrum Culture
For her new album, Björk works her way down from the treetops, and into the wide, weird world of fungi.
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Sputnik Music
Some will need a tunneling machine to get to them, and some other will make do with a spoon, but there's treasure to be found in the heart of Fossora, and if willpower is not enough to help you find them, mushrooms will surely help.
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Jezebel
In pop, the voice has long been the focus, but Björk’s recent work, especially on Fossora, argues that it need not be. It is democratizing. As an auteur, so much of what’s on her records comes from her, and, like the mycelium she rhapsodizes, it’s all connected anyway. Fossora is her most succinct illustration of this concept yet.
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Evening Standard
As ever, she’s so far removed from everyone else in music that these songs make most sense when the listener is fully immersed over an extended time period. There’s no point having them pop up amid lesser mortals on a Spotify playlist. With this one, it’s worth digging deep.
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The Irish Times
Musically, this is as wonderfully eccentric as you might expect. Björk uses instrumentation in an elemental way, unlike any other musician: the creeping, ominous clarinet of Victimhood; the woodwind that wheezes and gasps like a wounded animal against the off-kilter rhythm of Atopos; the flutes that provide a breezy optimism against the soft heartbeat thud of Allow. Collaborators include Indonesian dance duo Gabber Modus Operandi and experimental musician Serpentwithfeet, but this could never be mistaken for the work of anyone other than Björk. With an album that shifts and expands with every listen, she remains as effortlessly, uncompromisingly original as ever.
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Stereoboard
This is a superb album, full of inquisitive explorations and artistic bravery. Björk is one of Europe’s greatest living musicians.
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The Independent
Song patterns evolve slowly – none of this material will be bopping its way onto drive-time radio any time soon. But despite the occasional challenge of big blasts of (gleefully disruptive) discord on tracks such as “trolle-gabba”, those considering dipping a toe into avant garde pop will find the waters are warm on Fossora. Give it time – it’ll grow on you. Like a fungus.
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musicOMH
Tenth album finds inspiration in nature and humanity, upholding her uncompromising, singular vision with a synthesis of the digital and the organic.
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Igloo Magazine
While field recordings of Björk actually picking mushrooms or dancing on her coffee table is perhaps the biggest missed opportunity on Fossora, the opportunity of time that lockdown gave Björk to reconnect with nature, her evolving family and her love of the simple joys of domestic life, have delivered a truly remarkable album. Not just for its balance of the baffling and beautiful, but for truly succeeding in helping us all to reconnect on the most human of levels.
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The Boar
Fossora proves that Björk has no plans to slow down anytime soon. And I, for one, will be listening.
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The Arts Desk
Theatrical, multi-layered, restless, searching, the music and songs of fossora are akin to four-dimensional sound sculptures.
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The Forty-Five
The making of Björk’s matriarchy marks its territory in a bitter-sweet symphony to the cycle of life.
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The Wee Review
As with all good mushroom foraging, occasionally it’s possible to stumble upon something magic.
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The Glasgow Guardian
Overall, I found the album unexpected and captivating, and I understand the appeal of her music. However, having listened to it from start to finish, I didn’t find myself compelled to revisit more than a couple of the songs on the album. While highly original, Fossoria lacked for me the depth that would have allowed it to have a lasting impact.
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Under the Radar Magazine
Ultimately, Fossora is another step in Björk’s perpetual evolution as an artist. The album’s artwork is remarkable—as is the artwork of every Björk release—and Björk herself remains as charismatic and creative as ever. Still, Fossora is less engaging than Utopia, Vulnicura, and Biophilia, and except for “Ovule,” “Ancestress,” and “Allow,” cannot compete with her 1990s and early 2000s output. However, it is worth a listen, as the experience is strikingly intimate, often intriguing, and largely natural in its rhythm. As Björk mentioned in a recent interview, there is an elemental quality to Fossora, its rough edges and sometimes bitter taste being synonymous with those of the earth. This seems like a meaningful explanation of the album’s challenging style, though new listeners are less likely than devotees to accept such a challenge in the long run.
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Flood Magazine
The Icelandic songwriter, producer, and vocalist’s first album in five years sees her pulling up her own roots, replanting them, and cajoling them to blossom colorfully anew.
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God is in the TV
You will probably want to play this a number of times, firstly to get yourself into the headspace, and then to appreciate what a truly special album this is, even by its creator’s very high standards. Time well spent.
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