Björk Biophilia

The song titles on Björk’s Grammy-winning seventh studio album, Biophilia, sound like subject headers for a survey course on the origins of the universe: “Cosmogony,” “Dark Matter,” “Thunderbolt,” “Solstice.” But they’re all works of the Icelandic artist’s own wild imagining. And on Biophilia, they come together to form a sparse, intimate collection, one rooted in the endless wonders of the natural world. (And the unnatural one too: An interactive downloadable app for the album became the first of its kind to be added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) Galvanized by forces both personal (a vocal nodule had forced her to rethink her singing) and political (the financial crash in Iceland), Björk entered the studio with the idea of a concept album that would explore the musical links between nature and technology. Biophilia’s hushed opening track, “Moon,” begins with a delicate cascade of hand-plucked strings and quavering couplets about pearls and saliva, failure and flow. The similarly shimmering lead single “Crystalline,” co-produced with the British dubstep duo 16bit, arrives via a rush of glassy techno tinkling, while “Cosmogony” plays like a surreal lullaby, populated by silver foxes and cold black eggs. And the cagey “Mutual Core” breaks open into a frenzy of punkish breakbeats and barely-contained fury. As always, Björk’s relentless quest for novelty forced her to experiment in the studio—this is an album in which a Tesla coil is used an an instrument—and pushed to keep working well past her label’s deadlines: She was still tinkering with Biophilia weeks before its 2011 release. When the album finally landed, though, fans and critics alike swooned, greeting Björk’s prismatic musicality and signature tone shifts with open ears.