Homogenic

Björk had been planning to record this album at her home in London. Then a stalker mailed a sulfuric acid bomb to her house, filmed himself doing it, and sent her the tape. She left England and relocated to Spain to finish the record. What she made from that charged and frightening displacement was the most cohesive and purposeful album of her career.

The concept was ruthlessly simple. Previous Björk albums had pulled from dozens of different sonic directions. For Homogenic she decided on three elements only: beats, strings, and voice. She brought in Mark Bell, the electronic producer behind LFO, and gave him a brief that included requests like "can you make the bassline more furry?" The Icelandic String Octet was flown in from Reykjavik to record the string arrangements, which sit in extraordinary tension with the electronic production throughout the album. The beats are crushing and mechanical. The strings are sweeping and romantic. Björk's voice moves between them like something that belongs to both worlds and neither.

On your first listen you will feel the collision immediately. "Hunter" opens with a militaristic drum pattern and reversed accordion before her voice comes in overhead. "Jóga" builds strings into something volcanic. "Bachelorette" is a nine-minute gothic opera. "Pluto" sounds like controlled disintegration. The album is dedicated to Iceland and sounds like it was made by someone who had been separated from a place they loved and was trying to reconstruct it entirely from memory.