"Fossora" is the title of Björk's new studio album

On 2011´s Biophilia, Björk wrote about life on Earth in the context of the universe. Now, she has returned to terra firma, and gone sub terra, for a record of what she has termed “biological techno”. In her intervening albums, she has weathered emotional storms — describing the pain of her breakup with artist Matthew Barney in Vulnicura (2015); creating the brighter colours of a world filled with flutes and birdsong in Utopia (2017). In comparison, Fossora was created during an extended period at home in Iceland that she’s said made her feel “grounded”.

Still, it’s a record made during a time of transition for Björk: empty-nested after her 19-year-old daughter Isadora left home (making an appearance here as the co-singer/-writer of floaty, transcendent album closer Her Mother’s House); in mourning for the death of her mother, Hildur Runa Hauksdottir. Two consecutive songs are dedicated to the latter. The first, Sorrowful Soil (described in the lyric book as “a eulogy”), seems to treat grief as life-giving organic material and ends with the touching message to her mum: “You did well.” The second, the elaborate seven- minute-long orchestration of Ancestress (“an epitaph”) — featuring her 36-year-old son Sindri on vocals — is equally thankful in tone but reveals the rebellious spirit of Hauksdottir.

Hammering electro rhythms have been a central feature of Björk’s solo albums since 1993’s Debut, but elsewhere her music has gradually morphed into a post-rave neoclassicism with song structures so contorted that they’re unrecognizable as normal verse-chorus-bridge forms. The general, and fair, criticism of this development is that she has forfeited melody along the way — there’s no earwormy Hyperballad or Bachelorette here. A demanding listen initially, only really with repeated plays of Fossora does it really begin, as its title suggests, to burrow its way under your skin.

It’s worth remembering that Björk is inherently drawn to the outré — the Associates’ Sulk and Joni Mitchell’s Don Juans Reckless Daughter being among her favourite LPs. And so Fossora is not for the faint of heart, and in some ways bears comparisons to the aural challenges of latter-day Scott Walker. The other guests on the LP similarly tend towards the left-field: Norwegian jazz electronicist Emilie Nicolas on Allow, Brooklyn’s dream popper Josiah Wise AKA serpentwithfeet on Fungal Citv.

Bit by bit, though, these songs increasingly reveal their beauty. Over its five-and-a-half minutes, Allow revisits the flute arrangements of Utopia, and in its insistently hypnotic chorus, as Björk and Nicolas’s voices entwine with the words “allow, allow, allow, allow you to grow”, the effect is like watching a plant expanding in a sped-up time-lapse film. At the other end of the spectrum there is Victimhood, a dark place filled with unsettling bass clarinets, like creeping shadows, and the singer finding herself in a crater in the ground and trying to imagine herself from a high vantage point.

While they’re unlikely to send the listener off whistling their tunes, two songs feature slightly more traditional melodic structures. The push-and-pull delivery of the lines in the trombone- and-timpani-driven Ovule makes little sense at first, but slowly pulls into focus before the melody wends its ways to the none- more-Björk reminiscence: “When I was a girl/I fell in love with a building/I marched towards.”

Then there is the lovely Freefall, a song of oblique romance written for string quintet and voice, that sounds like Rezro Seress’s 1933 “Hungarian suicide song” Gloomy Sunday re-imagined for a film score in 1940s Hollywood. As Björk’s overlapping vocals gracefully and timelessly climb up an octave and into the chorus, reminding us that likely she would have been a world-famous singer in any age, the effect is soul-stirring.

By digging in the dirt and placing herself in a world of ovules and mycelia, moles and slugs, Björk has literally earthed herself. Fossora may involve a strange ecosystem, but it’s one filled with hope and joy and life, in all its forms, moving forwards.