Björk announces new "mushroom album" filled with gabber beats and bass clarinets

Alt-pop queen Björk has come down from her mystical fairyland on high with news of a new album. The legendary musician has unveiled the first details of her next album, titled Fossora—stemming from the latin word for “digger.” The album will be her first work since her 2017 album Utopia.

In a new interview with The Guardian, the singer envisions Fossora as: “Let’s see what it’s like when you walk into this fantasy and, you know, have a lunch and farrrrt, and do normal things, like meet your friends.” Dubbing the term “biological techno” to describe the album, Fossora features the booming lulls of a sextet of bass clarinets intermixed with eruptions of gabber, heavily influenced by the Indonesian punk duo Gabber Modus Operandi. In a conversation with the duo, she presented Fossora as her “mushroom album.”

“It’s like digging a hole in the ground. This time around, I’m living with moles and really grounding myself,” Björk says.

While her 2017 album Utopia is “a pacifist, idealistic album with flutes and synths and birds,” Fossora will focus on the Earth and all of its warmth and depth. “I got really grounded and I really, really loved it,” she says. Two songs on the album, “Sorrowful Soil” and “Ancestress,” are in dedication to her mother Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, who died in 2018. Additionally, the album will feature vocals from her son Sindri, her daughter Ísadóra, and the musician Serpentwithfeet.

In the interview, Björk also backtracks on her previous description of the album as a rave album for “people who are making clubs in their living room.”

“I was trying to take the mickey out of myself,” she says. “Here I am, this lady stuck in my living room in lockdown, and it’s a really serious song for four and a half minutes. And then it’s one minute of ‘WOO!’”

Fossora will be released this fall via One Little Independent Records. Björk is also set to soon debut a podcast series on her discography.