“Matriarch music” is how Bjork defined her work earlier this month. Appropriate, then, that the Icelandic experimentalist’s 10th album, Fossora, opens with a pounding, ritualistic tribute to her late mother (“atopos”) and ends with a stunningly tender hymn to her nest-flying daughter (“her mother’s house”). On the weird and winding journey between those two points, the record gets difficult, funny, soothing, quarrelsome, giddy, sad and wild. It’s a frank, loving reflection on the relationships between these three generations of women.
Fossora is also mushroom music. The album title is a feminised word for miner or digger, and its lyrical language taps into themes of deep-rooted connectivity and bursts of fleshy fruition. Grief is diffused into the atmosphere like “spores” on the title track, love is “a sunken mystery… bursting through the moss” on “Fungal City”. Bjork sings of how “mud-dense” motherhood “anchors our darks” on “ovule”. On “allow”, hope is “a primordial plant”.
