Bjork Post Album Art

[Cecila Dammrich]

The name Bjrk conjures some well-worn images. She's the otherworldly artist whose album rollouts resemble large-scale art projects. She's the avant-garde fashion maven who smiled serenely in the "swan dress" at the 2001 Oscars. And yes, she's the eternal kook selling a box set of 14 handmade bird-call flutes to complement her 2017 album, Utopia.

Born Bjrk Gumundsdttir, the singer moved from her native Iceland to London in the early '90s. Single in the big city with a young son, Sindri, the musician was eager for new experiences. London's sound clash of electronic music promised endless possibilities.

Gradually, Bjrk met her people. She found kindred spirits in Graham Massey, founding member of Manchester acid house innovators 808 State, and Nellee Hooper, a sound system veteran known for his work with Soul II Soul. Out of this creative awakening came Bjrk's Debut, in 1993, and its astonishing follow-up, Post, which turned 25 this June.

In her formative years, Bjrk played in rock bands, but she was never a rock loyalist. Growing up in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavk, she learned the country's folk songs from her grandmother. After her parents divorced early in her life, Bjrk moved between the domains of her straight-laced electrician father and free-spirited activist mother.

In spite of splitting her time between parents, she was always surrounded by music. Her mother couldn't afford an oboe, so Bjrk learned the flute instead. On the long walks to and from school, she honed her remarkable singing voice. She released an album at 11 years old and found success in the Icelandic alt-rock group, The Sugarcubes. (Her former husband and father to her son, Sindri, was the band's guitarist.)

Bjrk also found a creative groove with Nellee Hooper, a former member of the Bristol DJ collective The Wild Bunch turned GRAMMY-winning superproducer for the likes of U2, Sinead O'Connor and Gwen Stefani, among others. Bjrk and Hooper shared a vision for a complete concept, which would later become her aptly titled 1993 debut album, Debut. (The Massey-assisted "Army Of Me" and "The Modern Things" were shelved for later use.) Produced by Bjrk and Hooper alone, Debut cleanly broke ties with the singer's rock past and instead welcomed trip-hop, house and synth-pop into her sound.

In the afterglow of Debut, Bjrk went deeper into London club culture. She wanted her next album to reflect the restless pulse and possibilities of her newly adopted home. "Most acts were putting out seven-inches with throwaway lyrics like, 'Ooh, baby, baby,'" Massey told Paper Magazine in 1997. "But Bjrk took that culture and made an album with poetic lyrics. It blew everyone away. She never tried to fit in with any electronic movement, she just took the ideas and got personal with it."

That "poetic" album was Post. On its cover, Bjrk looks out from a heightened Piccadilly Circus in London's West End. Her jacket, designed by art world favorite Hussein Chalayan, resembles a U.K. Airmail envelope. (Bjrk, a frequent shopper at London's acid-house-inspired fashion store Sign Of The Times, already had designer cred.)

On nights out, Bjrk had got to know Hooper's friends, including Massive Attack collaborator Tricky and Scottish producer Howie B. With input from her nocturnal cohort, Bjrk was determined to make Post much more riotous than Debut.

Bjrk left the hustle of London to begin work on Post at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. The stories from those sessions are pure, uncut Bjrk excess. She used extra-long leads on her microphone and headphones to record at the ocean's edge. She sang "Cover Me" in a cave full of bats. On a side trip to Iceland, she swam in hot springs and admired glaciers with Tricky. (The pair briefly dated, but as Tricky put it bluntly to self-titled years later, "I wasn't a good boyfriend.")

Back in London, Bjrk continued to hone Post, reaching for a balance between organic sounds and machine-made elements. In the final stretch, she coaxed Brazilian composer Eumir Deodato from semi-retirement to help fill out the sound. At last, Post was ready for the world.

Albums often open with something moody and instrumental to set the tone. Post is not that kind of album. From the first moment, "Army Of Me" is all crunching propulsion, its shoulder-shaking lyrics sparked by Bjrk's sometimes-wayward younger brother. ("It's sort of a 'big sister telling little brother off' song," she told Stereogum in 2008.)

From the jump, Post refuses to sit still. No two tracks can be easily grouped. "Hyperballad" is somehow a few songs in one five-minute package: equal parts acid house and Deodato's swelling strings, with a virtuoso vocal performance that combines innocent wonder and furious catharsis.

All these years later, "It's Oh So Quiet" remains an uninhibited thrill. While reverent to the 1951 version by Betty Hutton, itself a powerhouse, the song's ecstatic Bjrk-ness cuts through the throwback big-band sound, building from a whisper to gale-force theatrics.

On "Isobel," written with Icelandic poet Sjn, Bjrk reached for, as she later told Stereogum, a "heightened mythical state." The song sounds like scaling a glacier and singing to the stars. But Post never lets you pin Bjrk as an ethereal, unknowable pixie. She also does "normal people" things, like getting too drunk and staying out until sunrise. (Hungover Bjrk interviews were a theme of the mid-'90s. "I come from a country where from the age of 15 you drink one liter of vodka every Friday straight from the bottle," she told SPIN in 1997.)

She also knows a messy breakup as well as anyone. So from the astral plane of "Isobel" we go to "Possibly Maybe," a lovelorn, but still wry slowburner. You picture it sung late at night in a London apartment, far from the warmth of the Bahamas.

"I Miss You," the final single released from Post, is the synthesis of all its wild instincts. There's so much here: horns, relentless percussion, a skittering, curving beat and Bjrk in blistering form. But the excess works. "Cover Me" and then "Headphones," written as an ode to Graham Massey's mixtapes, provide the album's gentle comedown. By the hushed final moments of Bjrk singing about sleep, you forget how furiously Post began.

After a nightmarish 1996, which included a scuffle with a journalist and a bomb threat from a stalker, Bjrk decamped to Spain to record a follow-up to Post. Released in 1997, the brilliant Homogenic was more unified and consciously Icelandic than its predecessors.

Homogenic set a precedent for an artistic reinvention by the singer every few years. As a result, other artists tend to credit the totality of Bjrk's output, rather than a single album, as inspirational. Most avoid her name at all: Citing a talent as vast and singular as Bjrk can only invite unfair comparisons.

Over the decades since Post, Bjrk has made a habit of working with artists she's inspired. "That's the good thing with being so obsessed with music," she told the Evening Standard in 2016, "you've always got other nerds who are obsessing, too. It's kind of ageless."

In recent years, those collaborators have included experimental electronic producers The Haxan Cloak and Arca as well as art-pop original ANOHNI. Throughout her many creative partnerships, Bjrk has battled sexist notions of authorship. "It's always like I'm this esoteric creature; that I just turn up and sing and go home," she vented to the Evening Standard.

Contemporary singer-songwriters Jenny Hval and Mitski openly worship Bjrk, both jumping at the chance to interview their hero for a Dazed feature in 2017. Other parallels can be reductive. Shapeshifting singer FKA twigs, for one, is often cited as Bjrk-like. While the pair share a collaborator in music video visionary Andrew Thomas Huang, the comparison is a too-easy catch-all for women skirting traditional pop.

In the 25 years since its release, Post has come to represent something wider than Bjrk's specific viewpoint. It's the best possible outcome of a timeless conceit: the transplant intoxicated by a new city, channeling their experiences and anxieties into art. In an era when cities are siloed and flights are grounded, Post feels impossibly romantic.

The last weekend of the month brings exciting new collaborations, including another iconic track from Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding, as well as a fierce team-up from Paris Hilton and Meghan Trainor. Halsey and Muni Long offered a taste of their forthcoming projects, while Jordan Davis and Miranda Lambert each delivered fun new country tunes.

In addition to fresh collabs and singles, there's a treasure trove of new albums to uncover. Highlights include Ice Spice's Y2K!, Rakim's G.O.D., Sam Tompkins' hi, my name is insecure, Wild Rivers' Never Better, Tigirlily Gold's Blonde, and kenzie's biting my tongue.

Although fans anticipated Machine Gun Kelly's next release to mark his return to hip-hop, no one seems to be complaining about "KellyRoll." Embracing the trend of venturing into the country genre, mgk teams up with fellow GRAMMY-nominated artist Jelly Roll on their newest track, "Lonely Road."

The genre-blending track interpolates John Denver's classic "Take Me Home, Country Roads." However, unlike Denver's sentimental ode to the simplicity of rural life, mgk and Jelly Roll reinterpret the track through the lens of romantic relationships that have come to a, well, lonely end.

As mgk revealed in an Instagram post, "Lonely Road" was a labor of love for both him and Jelly Roll. "We worked on 'Lonely Road' for 2 years, 8 different studios, 4 different countries, changed the key 4 times," he wrote. "We finally got it right."

In another interpolation special, Halsey samples not one but two classics in their latest single, "Lucky." The song's production features elements of Monica's 1999 hit "Angel of Mine," while the chorus flips Britney Spears' fan-favorite "Lucky" into a first-person narrative.

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