With a heavy bass, in a magical mushroom-filled world is how Björk greets us into the new realm she has created for her upcoming album Fossora, through her new music video for the first single called Atopos. If this serves as an introduction to what's to come, it's safe to say that we're definitely staying in this dark, psychedelic underground rave.
Fossora is actually inspired by underground raves that came out of the pandemic, and it's a made-up word meaning “digger, delver, ditcher,” as if she were digging, probably to the rhythm of that thumping bass clarinet sextet, into something beneath us that we or perhaps Björk herself is meaning to uncover. And that is unearthed in the lyrics, inspired by what Roland Barthes described as the unclassifiable other: “our differences are irrelevant / our union is stronger than us.”
We can try to speculate what she means by this, what larger discourse she is actually alluding to, but knowing her as we do, it's best to wait til the release of Fossora, on September 30, to fully understand her vision. Or we can wait to see if she'll talk about it in her new podcast, Björk:Sonic Symbolism. Either way, there are and there will be avenues to further understand the enigmatic icon, we just have to wait and see.