Björk Guðmundsdóttir was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1965, the daughter of an electrician and an activist. She was something of a child star in her home country, releasing her first album as simply Björk at 12 years old. A charismatic and distinctive vocalist, she fronted several bands before the 1986 formation of the Sugarcubes, which quickly became the first internationally successful Icelandic band (and just about the only internationally successful Icelandic band until the emergence of Sigur Rós).
Properly launching her solo career in 1993 with the album Debut, Björk became a groundbreaking artist at the intersection of alternative and dance music, and a frequent presence on MTV with a series of wildly imaginative music videos. Though American audiences sometimes saw Björk as a whimsical pixie from a mysterious faraway land, her catalog has become more and more ambitious and accomplished with each release. Arranging her songs for orchestras, programming cutting edge beats, and writing lyrics with wit, emotion, and historical and literary inspirations, Björk is an art pop icon and one of the world’s most original living songwriters.
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20. Björk (1977)
Over a decade before she released the album known as Debut, an 11-year-old Björk became a national celebrity after a recording of her singing was broadcast on the radio in Iceland, and she was offered her first record deal. Any diehard Björk fan should probably listen to her self-titled album, just to hear the occasional hair-raising moments confirming that the seeds of her unique phrasing were there from the very beginning, but few will want to hear it more than once. There is some impressive musicianship on the album, though, and “Arabadrengurinn (The Arab Boy),” co-written by Björk’s stepfather Sævar Árnason, is a sitar-spangled glimpse at what Icelandic disco apparently sounded like.
19. The Eye with Kukl (1984)
Before Björk, Einar Örn and Sigtryggur Baldursson found commercial success with the Sugarcubes, they made two albums in a darker post-punk style with an earlier band, Kukl. They played their first show opening for British anarchist punk legends Crass, whose label Crass Records released both Kukl albums. The Eye is an atmospheric and groove-driven record, with Örn’s abrasive vocals often crowding out Björk’s more appealing voice.
18. Drawing Restraint 9 (2005)
Björk was in a relationship with artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney from 2001 to 2013, and their most significant collaboration was his film Drawing Restraint 9, which Björk co-starred in and scored. The soundtrack album features some of the quietest and most experimental music of Björk’s career, with her singing on only three songs and indie rock legend Will Oldham singing on another. With her voice usually the defining feature of Björk’s albums, Drawing Restraint 9 is an intriguing opportunity to hear her compose instrumental music and let harp and shō, a Japanese woodwind instrument, carry her melodies. “This isn’t always an easy record – it demands stillness and patience from the listener,” David Peschek wrote in the Guardian’s review of Drawing Restraint 9.
17. Miranda with Tappi Tikarrass (1983)
Björk formed several bands as a teenager, including Exodus and the memorably named Spit and Snot. The first band she made records with, however, was the post-punk quartet Tappi Tikarrass, which made an EP in 1982 and a full-length the following year. Miranda is a rare instance of Björk writing her lyrics entirely in Icelandic, and her melodies sound lovely and in some ways more natural in her mother tongue. There are some blistering 2-minute songs like “Drek-Lek,” but the album contains a fairly sophisticated mix of styles and tempos similar to many of the band’s British and American new wave contemporaries. “Krió” in particular sounds like it could’ve been a hit single in another universe. Tappi Tikarrass reunited without Björk and recorded a new album in 2017.
16. Holidays in Europe (The Naughty Nought) with Kukl (1986)
At its best, Kukl’s second album fuses goth and a more pop sensibility similar to Siouxsie and the Banshees’ best work, and songs like “Gibralter (Copy Thy Neighbour)” and “Holland (Latent)” represent a significant leap forward in the development of Björk’s signature vocal style. Kukl split up shortly after the release of Holidays in Europe, though, with some of its members forming the Sugarcubes by the end of 1986.
15. Volta (2007)
Virginia hip-hop and R&B producer Timbaland was one of Björk’s most vocal fans in American pop in the ’90s, sampling “Jóga” on tracks by Missy Elliott and Total. Nearly a decade later, Björk invited Timbaland to work on her sixth album, and he co-produced two tracks on Volta and co-wrote one of them. The excitement around the long-awaited collaboration helped Volta become Björk’s only Top Ten album in America and made “Earth Intruders” her first Hot 100 entry in over a decade. Timbaland was at more of a commercial peak than a creative one in 2007, though, and his contributions to Volta are a little underwhelming. They also feel out of step with the rest of the album, which features lots of orchestral brass arrangements and two duets with British-American singer Anohni. “Where even her most divisive albums have managed to push her artistic boundaries, Volta feels limp and strangely empty– almost unfinished,” wrote Mark Pytlik in the Pitchfork review of the album.
14. Gling-Gló with Trio Guðmundur Ingólfsson (1990)
When Björk throws covers of songs written in the ’40s and ’50s into the futuristic soundscapes of Debut and Post, the contrast is arresting. For anyone who heard those tracks and pined for more of Björk as a jazz singer, there’s Gling-Gló, an album she recorded with a piano trio in between Sugarcubes records. Most of the songs on the album are Icelandic pop standards, though some American songs like “Ricochet” and “The Old Lamp-Lighter” are translated into Icelandic, and Björk has seldom sounded like she’s having more fun on a record.
13. Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week! with the Sugarcubes (1989)
As with their previous band Kukl, the Sugarcubes’ weakest album is the one that features trumpeter and vocalist Einar Örn on the mic a little more often than Björk. Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week! was regarded as something of a sophomore slump, charting lower than the band’s debut in several countries and receiving withering reviews. The band’s rhythm section puts a little spring in the step of the album’s best songs, though, including “Speed Is the Key” and “Dear Plastic.”
12. Stick Around for Joy with the Sugarcubes (1992)
Björk decided to embark on a solo career after Here Today, but the Sugarcubes had a third album on their record contract, so she stuck around long enough to make Stick Around for Joy. The aptly titled lead single “Hit” is the only song in Björk’s career to reach No. 1 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart, a dazzling track with soaring melodies, a funky backbeat, and DJ scratches. One of the band’s biggest influences, Siouxsie and the Banshees guitarist John McGeoch, guested on “Gold.” By the end of 1992, the Sugarcubes were done, and have since only reunited once for a 2006 concert in Reykjavik. “The song ‘Hetero Scum’ is particularly amusing — ‘I’m leaking you’re leaking’ yelps Örn — while ‘Vitamin’ works into a pretty good imitation of the wacky dance-pop of the B-52’s,” wrote Gina Arnold in the Entertainment Weekly review of Stick Around for Joy.
11. Selmasongs (2000)
Björk’s most significant film role, as the star of Danish auteur Lars von Trier’s musical Dancer in the Dark, has a complicated legacy. Film critics were sharply divided on the merits of the movie, though Björk’s performance as factory worker Selma Ježková was widely acclaimed, and fans who’d waited three years for a follow up to Homogenic weren’t entirely satisfied by the soundtrack album. In 2017, Björk accused von Trier of repeatedly sexually harassing her during the making of the film. There are some bright spots on Selmasongs, though, particularly “In the Musicals,” which feels she took an opportunity to put a little of the old Hollywood sparkle of “It’s Oh So Quiet” into one of her original songs. “I’ve Seen It All,” a duet that brought Björk together with another legendary singer at the peak of his powers, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, was nominated for an Oscar, and Björk walked the red carpet in an instantly iconic dress shaped like a swan.
10. Biophilia (2011)
In a career full of big ideas, Biophilia is probably the single most ambitious project Björk has ever undertaken. A multimedia “app album,” it features complex time signatures, new musical instruments developed specifically for the recording sessions, and lyrics that address environmental concerns and the 2008 global financial crisis that had disastrous effects on Iceland’s economy. The lead single “Crystalline” prominently features a “gameleste” (a hybrid of a gamelan and a celesta) and builds to a blistering drum and bass climax. The rest of Biophilia is rarely quite so exciting, though, and the album is arguably easier to admire as a concept than to enjoy as simply a collection of songs. Biophilia was Björk’s last collaboration with LFO’s Mark Bell, who’d worked on nearly all of her albums until his death in 2014.
9. Utopia (2017)
Björk’s albums have become less frequent since the ’90s. After completing 2015’s cathartic and heartbroken Vulnicura, though, she continued working with Venezuelan producer Arca on an album with a more hopeful tone that followed just two years later. The 71-minute Utopia is Björk’s longest album, and is themed around “air sounds” including birdsong field recordings and a 12-piece flute section. The effect is often serene and soothing, even when busy, stuttering electronic beats occasionally enter the mix.
8. Fossora (2022)
The flute-heavy sound of Utopia is expanded upon with Fossora, which features a wider variety of woodwinds. Björk didn’t stay too devoted to an early plan to make Fossora her “clarinet album,” though, and there’s a varied sonic palette that includes “Mycelia” and “Sorrowful Soil,” vocal pieces that return to the a cappella experimentation of Medúlla. Fossora is partly inspired by the 2018 death of the singer’s mother, and Björk’s daughter Ìsadóra sings on the closing track “Her Mother’s House.”
7. Life’s Too Good with the Sugarcubes (1988)
The Sugarcubes’ 1986 debut single featured the song “Ammæli” with Icelandic lyrics. The following year the band recorded the English version, “Birthday,” and signed with One Little Indian (now One Little Independent), the British label Björk has remained with ever since. The BBC’s John Peel helped make “Birthday” a hit in the U.K., and it soon became a college radio sensation in America, where the Sugarcubes were invited to perform on Saturday Night Live. Life’s Too Good is one of those effortlessly charming records that can suddenly turn the music world’s attention towards a country it had previously ignored, and without it we may not have all of Björk’s other great records. “Mama” remains one of her most powerful vocal performances, and there’s an infectious energy to the Sugarcubes’ best songs unlike anything in her solo catalog.
6. Medúlla (2004)
Medúlla marks the point in Björk’s career, to the delight of some fans and to the chagrin of others, where her albums became more heavily conceptual and far less likely to contain dance pop jams. Björk didn’t stick to her original idea of creating Medúlla entirely out of the human voice, ultimately fleshing out the songs with some synths and conventional instruments. Still, most of the sounds on the album came from the mouths of Björk and guests like Inuit throat singer Tagaq and Faith No More’s Mike Patton. “Where Is the Line,” which features both an Icelandic choir and human beatbox Rahzel of the Roots, is an exhilarating realization of Medúlla’s potential. “Oceania,” composed for the opening ceremony of the 2004 Summer Olympics, is an example of Björk’s rare gift for making music that functions on a global stage while still deeply individual and rooted in the avant garde.
5. Vulnicura (2015)
Not every great artist has made a breakup album, but it’s something of an emotional and creative rite of passage that has produced a number of classic records. And Vulnicura is Björk’s estimable contribution to the breakup album canon, inspired by the end of her relationship with Matthew Barney, her partner of 11 years and the father of one of her children. The album is often gorgeous and expansive, with several songs running over 8 minutes long that return to Homogenic’s palette of grand string arrangements and booming drums, as if Björk is soothing herself with beautiful melodies. And then there’s a dramatic tonal change on “Family,” with tense violins straight out of a horror movie: “Is there a place where I can pay respects for the death of my family?”
4. Debut (1993)
Even to those of us who were familiar with the Sugarcubes, there was something disorienting and otherworldly about Debut’s lead single “Human Behavior” when it first appeared on the radio and MTV in 1993. Björk and British producer Nellee Hooper (Soul II Soul, Sinead O’Connor) had created something utterly unique and haunting, a perfect invitation into the world she’d just begun to build. The album features some of Björk’s most danceable music like “Big Time Sensuality,” and only hints at some of the stranger territory she’d explore on later albums, but it was an enormous step forward from everything she’d made in the previous 16 years, justifying the title Debut.
3. Vespertine (2001)
Björk never really followed trends, but her early solo albums all exist in conversation with the rapidly changing sound of electronic dance music. Over the course of the ’90s, she absorbed and put her own spins on house, trip hop, and drum and bass. In the early 2000s, minimalism was coming into vogue in electronic circles, and Björk worked with collaborators like the experimental duo Matmos to create percussion sounds out of commonplace objects on Vespertine. The gentle, squishy textures of those loops, along with the work of avant jazz harp player Zeena Parkins, make for the strangely appropriate sonic backdrop of some of Björk’s most intimate and erotic songs.
2. Homogenic (1997)
One passage of “Pluto,” in which Björk howls wordlessly through a thick haze of vocal distortion over a pummeling beat, has become something of a meme on social media in recent years, often used by pop stans as an example of music that only a pretentious hipster could love. In the context of Homogenic, though, “Pluto” is the abrasive climax before the calming beauty of “All Is Full of Love” closes the album, an essential part of the journey. That push and pull between noisy, glitchy drums and sweeping string arrangements is the essential tension that drives Homogenic, Björk’s tribute to the beautiful but sometimes lethal volcanic topography of Iceland. “Esoteric yet blunt, Homogenic is an eerily sustained work that ambitiously shares the methods and auras of contemporary design, film, and theater,” Stephen Hunter wrote in the SPIN review of the album.
1. Post (1995)
Björk described Post as a “promiscuous” album because of its wide variety of styles and collaborators. And it’s that wildly eclectic spirit that makes it such an enduring and delightful album, veering from the stomping industrial opener “Army of Me” to the cute and campy “It’s Oh So Quiet,” from the bright tropical flavor of “I Miss You” to a pair of murky collaborations with trip hop auteur Tricky. Björk was never closer to the pop zeitgeist than in the mid-’90s, even writing a song for Madonna, and she seized that moment as audaciously as possible on Post.
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