Björk: Atopos review – one of the most dramatic left turns of her career

Björk’s last album, 2017’s Utopia, was a vision of paradise. Filled with birdsong and built around a 12-piece Icelandic flute section, it was one of the avant garde icon’s sweetest, quietest records, a suite of pastoral orchestration and hushed electronics that acted as an emotional counterweight to 2015’s Vulnicura, an album about her protracted, devastating divorce. In the intervening five years, during which Björk has been largely out of the public eye, it’s been easy to imagine her inhabiting some version of the world of Utopia, surrounded by lushness and beauty.

Atopos, the first single from her forthcoming tenth album Fossora, breaks that illusion. An ominous, clattering, almost-dance track made with Indonesian experimental duo Gabber Modus Operandi, it finds Björk shattering the idealism of her last record, replacing it with a steely pragmatism: “Pursuing the light too hard is a form of hiding,” she sings. A six-piece clarinet section swells beneath her, their discordant palpitations preventing the song from ever easing into the frantic techno rhythm that Gabber Modus Operandi’s hammering beat is trying to create. Although Björk is no stranger to abrasive textures, this is one of the more dramatic left turns of her career, and it’s a thrill to hear her paint with the brutalist tones of experimental techno.

There’s a distinctly apocalyptic mood to Atopos that doesn’t let up over the course of almost five minutes. But Björk isn’t the one doomsaying; instead, her lyrics are resolute, determined to find some way to repair the relationship that’s fracturing: “Our union is stronger than us / Hope is a muscle,” she sings, repeating the last line. As the song ends, the clarinets step into line with the beat, and the disparate parts begin to work together in manic harmony: Björk finds the connection she craves.