5 Essential Albums: Björk

The Icelandic queen of art pop has been enchanting me for more than three decades

I loathe the term “superfan”. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot in major label meetings and LinkedIn discussions these days.

I’m not a superfan – I’m a music lover. I admire the works of art themselves, not the people who make them. They’re fallible humans, just like you and me. Their personal life interests me only as far as it bleeds into the art.

There are some exceptions though. There’s a rare breed of artists that deserve to be worshipped, because their art is not humanly so they must be goddesses, and one of them is Björk.

photo: Vidar Logi, courtesy of One Little Independent

In May 2025, Björk released the full version of the massive concert film Cornucopia, documenting her eponymous four-year tour that focused on a setlist compiled mainly from three albums: Utopia (2017), Vulnicura (2015), and Fossora (2022).

To promote the film, she even sat down for her first on-camera interview in over ten years with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe – an hour that is well worth the watch. I also want to point you to Jazz Monroe’s 2022 Pitchfork cover story “Mother, Daughter, Force of Nature”, which starts with the writer driving around Reykjavik on the passenger seat of Björk’s Land Rover.

For her tours, Björk will usually pick songs from a certain career period or a group of specific albums. When I went to see her show as part of her orchestral tour at Berlin’s Waldbühne in 2022, she played material from Vulnicura (2015), Post (1995) and Homogenic (1997), with single songs from other albums sprinkled in.

As a huge admirer, I’ve felt the urge to write a post leading novices through Björk’s extensive catalogue for a while. Luckily all of it is good, so you can basically start anywhere. She has never really produced a bad album. This post is about five Björk albums that I particularly love.

Please note that it makes sense to take in Björk’s albums as full bodies of work, one at a time, and really dive into the worlds she conjures by collaging sounds and instruments, beats and vocals, poetry and visuals. Single songs or “Greatest Hits” type playlists will always just represent small excerpts from those extensive galaxies.

Debut (1993)

Björk landed in London at the start of the 1990s as a storied punk princess from Reykjavik with a three-octave vocal range. Her modestly successful band, The Sugarcubes, had dissolved. In London’s and Manchester’s clubs, she found inspiration in new sounds from the early hardcore continuum.

Equipped with a record deal as a solo artist, she commenced work on an album, bringing together all of her influences from pop, jazz, classical, folk – and her newest love, electronic music.

Nellee Hooper, one of the original architects of the Bristol scene, co-produced Debut. The beats sound extremely of their time – think organ chords mixed with synth stabs, syncopated house beats and sampled drums from jazz and bossa records. Not to say they sound dated; this is just a classic early 1990s sound, which has aged relatively well.

Debut contains a bunch of evergreen smashes that dominated MTV in the mid-1990s (“Human Behaviour”, “Venus As A Boy”, “Big Time Sensuality”, “Violently Happy”), introduced the world to Björk’s idiosyncratic approach to singing and cemented her burgeoning star status. It makes sense to get to know these songs before diving into her more avant-garde works from the 2000s and beyond.

But Debut is not just a collection of college radio-ready singles. There’s a lovely rendition of a jazz standard accompanied by nothing but harp (“Like Someone in Love”), and an outro tune with a maritime, folky brass arrangement (“The Anchor Song”). I always loved the second verse of “There’s More To Life Than This”, which was mixed to sound as if Björk was singing it from a club toilet, and of course the dreamy, enchanting proto-trip-hop of “Come to Me”.

2025 Verdict: One of Björk’s definitive classics with many hits and strong production from Wild Bunch beatsmith Nellee Hooper. Not quite as groundbreaking as her following works, but positioned her as a burgeoning indie pop star with avant-garde leanings.

Biggest hit: “Human Behaviour”

My favorite song: “Come to Me”

Post (1995)

After the success of her first album, Björk started even more directly reflecting new directions in experimental electronic music. Leaving Debut’s tasteful but relatively tame coffeehouse sound behind, she entered darker and more euphoric basement club territory on Post.

Recording her sophomore album, she was approaching her 30th birthday. Still in London, she was trying to enjoy early celebrity fame. Her music still matched the zeitgeist, but she was already moving further away from commercial pop music. She collaborated with producers from the UK’s electronic underground, like Tricky, Mark Bell (of LFO) and Graham Massey (of 808 State). For the remixes collected on Telegram (1996), she would recruit even more radical beatmakers like Dillinja and Mika Vainio to deconstruct some of her tunes.

Post starts with the earth-shaking, dystopian hip-hop of “Army Of Me” and ends on the stunningly minimal outro “Headphones”; in between, Björk moves through progressive beats of all shapes and sizes. But wait there’s more: A broadway showtune which also received an iconic Spike Jonze video and remains her biggest crossover hit (“It’s Oh So Quiet”), an anthem where she sings the most surreal lyrics over a shuffling house beat and a string section arranged by Brazilian fusion composer Eumir Deodato (“Hyperballad”), and some gorgeous slow-burning jams in the second half that have turned into setlist staples (“Isobel”, “Possibly Maybe”).

2025 Verdict: Many think of Post as Björk’s quintessential album by any standard. I can’t really disagree. No skips on this record – every song still holds up without constraints.

Biggest hit: “It’s Oh So Quiet”

My favorite song: “Hyperballad”

Vespertine (2001)

Almost a decade into her solo career, Björk had established a process. She would always adapt and experiment with new technologies; but writing a new record usually started with an abstract moodboard of colors, words, ideas, sounds – and instruments. For Vespertine, those foundational instruments were harp, glockenspiel and music box.

Musically as well as thematically, her albums are often shaped by countermovements to their direct predecessors, and Vespertine was an answer to Homogenic’s lush strings and widescreen beats that evoked the wild landscapes of her home country.

Vespertine’s beats felt microscopic in comparison. They were built out of the smallest, most casual noises, inspired by the glitch and micro-house scene. Once again, Björk summoned producers from the experimental electronic underground, like Matmos, Console or Opiate, to contribute sounds and ideas.

photo: Vidar Logi, courtesy of One Little Independent

Björk had recently bought her first laptop so she could write music in software like SuperCollider, ProTools and Sibelius, not being attached to a studio anymore. She’d also left London for New York. Her clubbing days were gone by now. She’d fallen in love with the visual artist Matthew Barney, and the couple would have a daughter soon. Björk’s second child, Ísadóra Bjarkadóttir Barney, was born in 2002.

She’d also just lived through a traumatic experience starring in her first movie. Constant clashes with abusive and manipulative director Lars von Trier at the set for Dancer In The Dark left her longing for a safe space, which she found at home, surrounded by her loved ones. Vespertine is an ode to those intimate spaces, creating a sense of arrival, a homecoming of sorts after a decade of roaming the world.

I’ve previously written a whole post about Vespertine and its wide range of musical influences.

2025 Verdict: Vespertine’s wintry, introspective sound celebrates Björk’s retreat from the public to find joy in family life. I’ve always found it to be one of her albums with the highest replay value.

Biggest hit: “Hidden Place”

My favorite song: “Pagan Poetry”

Volta (2007)

Björk wrote large portions of Volta at sea. Sick of the post 9/11 political climate in the U.S., she didn’t feel like raising children there – hence her family temporarily moved onto a sailboat, cruising the Caribbean.

In her Sonic Symbolism podcast, she describes working on this album as similar to an “extreme yoga class”. She was in the midst of reclaiming her body after childbirth, but also returning to the world of politics and eco-feminist activism.

Björk has said this album’s beats have a “tribal” feel to them. As Shawn Reynaldo recently pointed out, that adjective can be quite problematic. But she’s not saying they sound vaguely African – hers is more of a universally primordial, ceremonial or even shamanic vision. She collaborated with iconic hip-hop producer Timbaland on three songs, including lead single “Earth Intruders”, that comes equipped with Tim’s trademark synths and a trunk-rattling hip-hop groove with loads of loose, clattering percussion.

But again, Björk wrote and produced the best material on Volta on her own, employing traditional instruments as sound colors in the process – like a Chinese plucked lute called pipa on “I See Who You Are” and the West African kora on “Hope”, played by legendary Malian musician Toumani Diabaté. And finally, there are two bone-chilling duets with ANOHNI, of which “The Dull Flame of Desire” is a high point of the record, with lyrics from a translated Russian poem that plays a central role in the Tarkovsky movie Stalker.

2025 Verdict: Maybe not Björk’s strongest album, but one of the more easily accessible ones. Upon revisiting it almost 20 years later, I found it much more enjoyable and rewarding than I remembered it.

Biggest hit: “Earth Intruders”

My favorite song: “Wanderlust”

Vulnicura (2015)

Björk wrote this dark and violent song cycle after her marriage to Matthew Barney dissolved. Songs like “Stonemilker” and “Black Lake” paint a bleak picture of betrayal and abandonment, and the deep emotional valley she had to wade through in the aftermath of that hurtful break-up. When Björk blurts out a line like “show me emotional respect”, you cannot not feel the deep anger and sorrow encapsulated in those words.

I have a special, quite personal relationship to Vulnicura. At the time it was released, I went through a break-up of a long-term relationship too, and this record consoled me on many nights, licking my wounds. That’s why it has stayed one of the most important pieces of music in my life.

This album was written, produced and recorded in close collaboration with Venezuelan electronic music producer Arca. Their beats are either thumping slowly or rolling menacingly; they often feature huge, dramatic string sections recalling Björk’s landmark album Homogenic; sometimes the drums will start sputtering like broken machines on the verge of giving up. One main sound on this album comes from the celeste, a keyboard instrument that looks like a harmonium but whose tone resembles a glockenspiel.

I don’t know many albums that really capture how depressive episodes actually feel. Listening to Vulnicura, you’ll soon find yourself in an emotional state that feels like you’re dropped into the “Black Lake” video: Deep inside that cave, you might be aware that the light of day still shines somewhere, but it’s just very far away and you have no idea if and when you will ever make it up there again.

That’s not to say Vulnicura can’t be enjoyed in a positive mindstate. While it’s a piece born out of mourning and disappointment, the music can have an opposite effect on the listener – I’ve found myself going back to it regularly as a reminder of worse times, its hopeless melancholy still leading me to catharsis each time.

2025 Verdict: This is sort of a dark horse. Her most intense, difficult record, but that deep emotional core also makes it one of her strongest. 22 years after her ascent through Debut, Björk proved that as a mature woman artist, she had even more important things to say than ever before.

Biggest hit: “Stonemilker”

Favorite song: “Lionsong”