“Black Lake” on Vulnicura was the darkest and saddest I’ve ever gone. It felt like I’d broken into a new place. Just sitting in the church when we recorded it was really satisfying. I’ve listened to this choir all my life, so to finally write something for it was really scary and courageous. I sang myself in this choir when I was 16. We invited, this incredible Icelandic woman who’s in her 70s. In the beginning it was 20 minutes long, and I ended up recording a 60-piece choir on it. I did not know what to do with that song. And “Body Memory” was a really strange song for me. “Loss” is very much a continuation of “Pagan Poetry,” a certain sort of girl goth music.

It becomes more powerful than everyday life. Obviously, as somebody who makes music, I’m very curious about the written word, or the fact that you can make something, whether it’s a play or a movie or a song or music or literature or poetry-or texts-that can be so strong that it takes on its own life. Maybe they didn't meet that often, but it was still pure love. I don’t think you can blame that on technology-you hear stories about people 200 years ago writing each other letters and completely falling in love. I wanted to explore that and see what it felt like. It was this mental energy that was almost utopian, like a fantasy. I’d never really had that feeling before. It’s like it’s more natural to be texting them than to actually sit next to them.

When you feel really connected to someone and you are texting them every day, sometimes all day, and then you meet them, you kind of feel embarrassed. I was almost like an explorer going to new territory, seeing what it felt like. It was with several people it wasn’t just one person. There was definitely a moment making this album where how much I was texting went up. Do you see a relationship between the technology you use to make your music and the technology you use to connect with other people? On “ Blissing Me,” you sing about swapping MP3s with a romantic interest as a form of bonding. There’s a cultural suspicion around technology-people say it alienates us, but your music has always seemed to approach it positively. Maybe that even exaggerated the contrast: You sing a really, really tragic song and you go home and you stand on your head and make a beat out of a ping-pong machine. We were just like, “Oh my God, we’ve earned the lightness!” When I was writing Utopia and still singing the Vulnicura songs, I felt like I was having an affair from my own grief. When we did the last gig, me and Alejandro went in the dressing room and had a few glasses of champagne. We did Carnegie Hall, and the whole room was sobbing. When we did the concerts, that became even more exaggerated. The narrative on Vulnicura was so heavy, the story was so important and prominent, and the instruments and beats served that story. It’s almost like an optimist rebellion against the normal narrative melody. The melody’s like a constellation in the sky. The first song I wrote on this album, the opening song, “Arisen My Senses,” is the opposite. Looking back now, the melodies on Vulnicura are very sad, and there’s short spaces between the notes. I started listening to completely different music, very euphoric, hyper, free music. You just lift off like an air balloon and float up to the sky. It was really exciting to drop all those rocks off and suddenly be really free. All the sounds are heavy-the beats are like rocks. Writing with Ghersi, she could let her guard down and simply play, an approach that brought bright, bubbling synths, an Icelandic flute ensemble, and the sounds of birds into the album’s mix. Björk describes their intergenerational creative union as a rare bond. It’s also the product of a fruitful mentorship Ghersi is 28 and Björk, who has been recording music since she was 11, is about to turn 52. The result of a collaborative writing process with Venezuelan producer Alejandro Ghersi, aka Arca (who co-produced most of the songs on Vulnicura), Utopia often sounds like a conversation between two brilliant musical minds communicating on their own telepathic wavelength. But it can also be rejuvenating, and Utopia is saturated with a honeymoon glow, even as it occasionally calls back to darker moments from across Björk’s career. Of course, opening yourself up to people you might not trust yet can be terrifying. For her, Tinder is shorthand for a heightened emotional space, the kind where sparks seem to flow in all directions, and connections with new people come readily. The joy and excitement that courses through Utopia recently led Björk to jokingly dub it her “Tinder album,” though, as she notes during a phone conversation from her home in Reykjavik, she’s never actually used the dating app.

Bjork matthew barney breakup