Every Björk Album, Ranked from Worst to Best

I take a deep dive into the discography of one of the most intriguing artists of my lifetime.

No artist of her generation has treated reinvention so casually, as if it were a simple, reflexive habit, as Björk.

Over more than three decades as one of the more eccentric alternative artists in the world, she’s turned pop and dance music into an endlessly intriguing, frequently beguiling chemistry experiment. Every project answers a question most people hadn’t thought to ask before, changing the way songs are conceived, recorded, mixed, and presented as immersive, multimedia experiences.

Every Björk album is anchored by her distinctive voice, one that spans three octaves and features an unparalleled gift for melody. Maybe this is a self-own to admit on the record, but more than anything else, my lingering takeaway from this deep dive into her studio discography is that she doesn’t get enough credit for how great a singer she is. Her stylistic flourishes may not be for everyone, but her raw vocal ability is undeniable.

With that in mind, ranking Björk’s albums isn’t really about tracing a linear “worst to best” thread through her career. Her discography doesn’t really operate that way. As you’ll see, it’s a circular, cyclical organism that’s prone to multiple layers of commentary, whether it’s about geopolitics, environmental conservatism, or her own turbulent love life. Her sound lives and breathes on those same terms.

Björk has always called herself a “pop musician,” but that label feels laughably trite. “World builder” is more apt, if you ask me.

Before we begin, a couple of quick housekeeping notes. First, if you’re a new or recent subscriber and haven’t caught up on all the discography ranking projects I’ve published already, you can find the archive here. Artists as wide-ranging as Kate Bush, Madonna, Guns N’ Roses, Bob Marley, and U2 are just some of the names I’ve covered.

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Onwards:

10. Volta (2007)

In the run-up to Volta’s release, the album was pegged as, if not a return to form, certainly a return to her more pop-oriented roots. In addition to working with longtime collaborator Mark Bell, she also welcomed Danja and Timbaland into the fold as producers, both of whom were in the middle of a hot streak that saw them dominate the pop charts with hits from Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake, to name just a couple. “I’d done two or three projects in a row that were quite serious,” Björk told Pitchfork. “Maybe I just needed to get that out of my system or something. So all I wanted to do for this album was just to have fun and do something that was full-bodied and really up.”

I’d say the “full-bodied” descriptor is apt. There’s a moment early on “Earth Intruders” where Björk’s voice punches through a massive wall of marching drums, horns, and distorted samples, proclaiming: “We are the earth intruders!” You feel it in your gut. It’s far more urgent-sounding than her icier, more reserved work, with tribal percussion, industrial sound effects, and fiery vocals clanging into each other as much as they run in the same direction. At times, it’s downright electric, as on “Wanderlust,” which is a stone’s throw away from an epic Kanye West track, and “Declare Independence,” an in-your-face protest anthem that’s landed Björk in hot water more than once. I guess that’s how you know it’s effective.

But, overall, Volta also struggles to hold together. Its competing priorities—it wants to be a dance record, a political manifesto, and a mid-2000s electro-fever dream—result in it a scattershot, unfocused feel. There are also unverified stories about additional Timbaland tracks left on the cutting room floor, so maybe there was a more cohesive, pop-specific version of this record that never saw the light of day. Maybe that would’ve worked better as an album experience, who knows. Nevertheless, as a listener, Volta feels like it’s pulling you in multiple different directions at once, arguably diluting your attention in the process.

But, with that all said, this record may be worth your time if you’re into Björk’s more mainstream-leaning material. In fits and starts, it’s utterly charming, even if it’s running on pure adrenaline for most of its running time.

9. Utopia (2017)

One of my overarching takeaways after diving into Björk’s discography is that, with maybe one exception that we’ll get to shortly, each album is, in some way, a commentary on what came immediately before it. It’s almost as if she’d have a checklist of what moods or aesthetics she’d tackled last time out and purposely run in the other direction. So, after Vulnicura laid bare the wreckage of her split from contemporary artists Matthew Barney, Björk veered into a sonic universe that sounded completely different. Lush, expansive, and heavy on woodwinds and strings in the arrangements, it plays like a rebirth of flora rather than a continuation. At the time, she called it her “Tinder record,” though, in hindsight, it’s more of a folktronica take on a James Horner or Howard Shore film score. If that sounds like your thing, you’ll probably dig this.

And, if that doesn’t sound like your thing, it’s worth pointing out that the instrumentals on this record are undeniably gorgeous. “Blissing Me” is tender in its specificity, a song about falling in love with someone over text and music link swaps (as a concept, it will never not sound incredibly romantic to me, anyway). “Courtship” mixes a classical flute section with a jungle-adjacent beat in a way I low-key loved, and the title track is arguably the most cinematic (and strangest) moment on this entire album. It’s worth mentioning that Utopia is also, as of this writing, the first and only time she’s enlisted a full-time collaborator from the start of a project (Arca, in this case). Previously, Björk’s co-producers would get to work after all the songs and arrangements were finalized. That trend was broken here, and I think it’s to the record’s benefit. For the first time in a while, her music felt like it held together on its own merits.

There’s a lot of music to dissect here. Coming in at more than 70 minutes, the tracklist is long and dense and many songs stretch out well past the five-minute mark. For newcomers to Björk, I don’t recommend starting with Utopia. It will feel like more of an endurance test than it may need to be. However, if you’re already on board with her willingness to throw caution to the wind and experiment, there’s a lot to like here, especially if you’re open to repeat listens. It’s already grown on me after several run-throughs, and I suspect it will do the same for others discovering her entire body of work for the first time.

8. Biophilia (2011)

Björk didn’t invent immersive media, but she certainly helped push alternative music into the deep end of that pool with Biophilia. It was billed as the first “app album,” with the music released alongside a dense digital ecosystem that enabled listeners to view the score in real-time, access custom animations by Stephen Malinowski, play games related to each song, hear early work-in-progress versions of each track, and much more. The “mother app” even featured an intro from Sir David Attenborough! Insanely detailed physical media and custom instruments for a one-of-a-kind concert tour followed soon after. “Björk truly innovated the way people experience music by letting them participate in performing and making the music and visuals, rather than just listening passively,” said Museum of Modern Art Senior Curator Paola Antonelli, after the institution announced the Biophilia app would be the first downloadable app enshrined in their permanent collection.

And, what about the music, you ask? It’s … fine. Actually, it’s good—at points, very, very good—but, in the context of Björk’s canon, it doesn’t get anywhere close to her peak. Songs like “Cosmogony” and “Cyrstalline” were a little stiff and more formal than I expected, with the latter’s complex polyrhythms supposedly mimicking the formation of minerals, both on our planet and elsewhere. It’s certainly interesting in the way a science class lecture can be, but I never found myself engaging with a lot of the material beyond that point. It won’t be the first time I say this in this write-up: I frequently respect Björk’s music for its technical aptitude more than I enjoy it on a purely emotional level, if that makes any sense. On Biophilia in particular, she can keep her listeners at arm’s length with an almost academic remove at times.

But, even so, she still manages a handful of absolutely mesmerizing moments. Opener “Moon” features vocals and harp that cycle around each other like orbits around the Earth (or sun) to arresting effect. “Mutual Core” erupts at the midway point like a geological event eons in the making, and “Virus” is charming in its childlike intimacy. In an age where we’re increasingly passive in our media consumption, Biophilia asks you to do far more than sit and listen. It’s full of empty space for the audience to play around in, inviting us to join her in returning to a state of eternal curiosity. Of asking “why” and “how.” On a fresh listen, the record still sounded eerily modern, like returning to an artifact that predicted many a “post-pop” tech experiment.

7. Fossora (2022)

The word “fossora” is not actually a word. It’s a made-up feminine form of “fossor,” which is Latin for “digger.” It fits. By the time this album arrived, Björk had done some serious tunneling into dark emotional territory. Two traumatic events in particular shaped the themes and songwriting from these sessions: the death of mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, who passed away in 2018, and that gigantic global event that began in the early stages of 2020. During the latter, she stayed close to home in Iceland, where she worked through her grief and watched her children grow into adults. The resulting tracklist feels like both a burial and a rebirth, as if she’s trying to make art out of the dirt under her feet.

As with her other 2010s efforts, the production is dominated by dissonant factions. Low-end beats rumble beneath clarinet and string ensembles, giving the orchestral arrangements an underground house and electro kind of vibe. The sonic palette isn’t heavy, though. There’s a warmth to these songs that suggests, even after death or decay, there’s hope in knowing the soil renews with time. You can hear that narrative play out on the two tracks that explicitly reference her mother in the liner notes, “Sorrowful Soil” and “Ancestress.”

Other highlights include opener “Atopos,” towards the end of which Björk proclaims, “Our union is stronger than us/Hope is a muscle that allows us to connect,” and “Fungal City,” which glimmers with trance-sized grandeur. Throughout the album, her vocals carry a weary intensity that evokes genuine heartbreak like few other artists I’ve heard. I’m not saying that Björk “does grief better” than other musicians, but maybe because it serves as both a eulogy and an offering to the future, it hit me on a different level.

This record’s most insightful revelation might be how alive it can feel when you’re one with the dirt, processing life and death, nurture and rot, as a single, intertwined inevitability. After decades of sky-searching, of virtual worlds, angelic choirs, and cosmic flutes, she looks down, into that mess, and finds divinity there. She acknowledges and sits with loss without erasing joy. It’s arguably her most maternal and, as a woman in her 50s contemplating her place in the world, her most human.

6. Medúlla (2004)

No drums. No guitars. No strings. Except some light piano and synth work, it’s just voices, hundreds of them, stacked and sculpted into a sonic collage that’s simultaneously ancient and futuristic. According to an interview she gave to the New Yorker, Björk said she’d wanted to make a record fueled almost entirely by the human voice since she was a teenager. It was also a conscious move in the opposite direction of Vespertine, a release known for its innovative use of electronic instrumentation and effects. Enlisting two separate choirs (Icelandic and London, for those keeping score at home), two beatboxers (Rahzel and Shlomo), and a throat singer (Tanya Tagaq), among many other performers, she crafted a tracklist that’s truly like no other. Divisive though it has become, nothing has quite risen to the level of Medúlla’s vocal ingenuity before or since. Even for Björk, it’s a unique piece of art.

It would be easy to describe this album as an acquired taste or obtuse bit of experimentation, but that would be miss at least some of the point. It’s not weird for the sake of being weird. It’s extraordinary in its commitment to pushing the form forward, exploring what precisely is possible to do in a music context with the human voice. Turns out, there’s a whole lot you can do if you’re this talented. For example, “Who Is It” is a percussive, joyous pop song that’s so disarming that you quickly forget that the beat is made out of intricately layered vocal snippets. “Where Is the Line” is towering in its glitchy ecstasy, while my personal favorite, “Oceania,” written for the Athens Olympics, is a slippery ode to the depths of the sea. Also, fun fact: That’s an actual car purring in rhythm on closer “Triumph of a Heart.”

If not among her best albums, Medúlla may be her most intentional. There’s not a wasted breath or silence. Every choice when it comes to arrangements, editing, and mixing is executed with surgical precision, but how could it not be? I don’t think you undertake a project of such technical ambition without going into it with a concrete vision of how you’re going to carry it out. Is this record for everyone? No, but it’s not trying to be either. Like Utopia, if you’ve never listened to a Björk LP in one sitting before, I don’t know if I’d begin here in the same way. I wouldn’t recommend venturing into the deep end of a pool until you’re a comfortable enough swimmer. However, what this album deserves is universal praise and respect for what it accomplished. Years before the likes of Animal Collective began to make inroads with similar techniques, she did it first and, depending on who you ask, did it the best, too.

5. Debut (1993)

So, I’ll admit that treating this as Björk’s “debut” is a bit of a misnomer. The reality is, by the time she released this LP, she’d already been working as a singer and musician for some time. Following an appearance on Icelandic radio where she sang a rendition of Tina Charles’ “I Love to Love, she was signed to a label and released one self-titled album while still a child. It’s considered juvenilia and not widely acknowledged as part of her studio discography, so I didn’t include it here in my rankings, but it’s a pleasant enough listen for the completists out there who want to seek it out. From 1986 to 1992, she was the lead singer of the Sugarcubes, an Icelandic outfit that eventually became popular enough to tour North America to great acclaim and even appear on Saturday Night Live. But Björk’s infatuation with London’s underground club culture and growing distaste for outdated guitar-driven rock led her to leave the group to pursue a solo career. Debut is what came out of those first recording sessions.

Back during this newsletter’s very first week of existence (!), I wrote about this album and said, among other things, that “[every track] feels like an authentic extension of her personality. Perhaps that’s why, even on repeat listens, the emotional purity of it all remains intact.” I stand by that claim, especially regarding the deeper cuts. Many of you may be familiar with the hits, such as “Human Behavior” and “Big Time Sensuality,” but there’s equal delight to be found in the funky “Come to Me,” the thumping “Violently Happy,” and the ravishing cover of the jazz standard, “Like Someone in Love.” By folding in elements of trip-hop, techno, synth-pop, and early versions of her distinctive brand of folktronica, she also proved she had range right out of the gate. In the decades since, few solo pop acts have hit the ground running as fully-formed as Björk did on Debut.

It’s also worth re-mentioning here that the critical establishment wasn’t ready for what she was selling in those days. Many still aren’t, sadly. At the time, Rolling Stone called the album “utterly disappointing” and “painfully eclectic.” That assessment is very much of its time. Debut dropped a couple of months before In Utero, the LP that signaled the beginning of the end of grunge’s dominance of North American pop culture. It’s fun to consider where she would’ve landed in the mainstream lexicon had she launched her solo career just a few years later and ridden some of pop’s girl power wave to even bigger record sales. Somehow, I don’t think that would’ve changed her approach one bit. She’s one of music’s true iconoclasts and, as we’ll see in a few moments, she had plenty more greatness in store for listeners before the 1990s came to a close.

4. Post (1995)

Follow-up albums to successful debuts are frequently the most fascinating pivot points in artists’ career arcs. It’s like, okay, you’ve tasted some success, now the pressure’s on to prove it wasn’t a fluke. If you’re really good, then you’re able to do that while also expanding the scope of what people understand you’re capable of. Björk’s Post is a masterclass in that latter art of escalation. Debut did well enough internationally that she could’ve played it safe (lol) and given her growing fan base a direct sequel. Refined and meticulous in its craftsmanship, but essentially running the same formulas back for another go round. At this point in the piece, I think you and I know Björk a bit better than that. She not only widened the playing field stylistically, but she detonated almost every rule she’d recently written for herself.

That blissful IDGAF attitude is apparent from the jump. Album opener “Army of Me,” written and produced by her and 808 State’s Graham Massey, is an infectious, defiant cruiser, with vocals that pierce through the metallic stomp-clap rhythm that, once you hear it, is insanely difficult to get out of your head. From there, the tracklist shapeshifts without warning. “Isobel” and “Possibly Maybe” push her trip-hop sensibilities into darker, stranger territory, pairing delicate storytelling with beats that twitch and unravel beneath her voice. “You’ve Been Flirting Again” is secretly one of her best love songs, and “It’s Oh So Quiet” is the showstopper, a song that crashes through the wall, Kool-Aid Man style, with all the energy of a runaway Broadway musical. It’s one of those 90s curiosities that shouldn’t work as well as it does, but here we are.

What makes Post so thrilling is its lack of fear. It’s Björk doubling down on her proud weirdness, unafraid to be loud, messy, and romantic all at once. That unabashed enthusiasm extends to her music videos, which I regrettably haven’t touched on in detail yet, and probably deserve their own deep dive, but suffice it to say that she pushed the envelope just as hard visually as she did sonically. Every song feels like it spins the same DNA into different moods and subgenres unique to her budding persona. It brims with the confidence that comes with an artist who discovers they can bend pop music into anything they want.

Post is the opposite of whatever a sophomore slump is.

3. Vulnicura (2015)

If breakup albums were forms of architecture, Vulnicura would be a massive, angular, brutalist masterpiece. No decorative flourishes. No attention-diverting armor or conceit. Only the exposed structural elements of a broken heart. This album is easily Björk’s most devastating work, a raw, symphonic autopsy of her split from artist Matthew Barney. Taking its title from the Latin for “cure of wounds,” it’s more complex than simply being about the loss of the relationship. Across nine tracks, she charts every stage of her heartbreak, from denial to anger to acceptance, with the matter-of-fact precision of an entomologist picking and prodding at an insect’s corpse. If the metaphors I’ve used so far haven’t spelled it out already, this one’s not a fun or comfortable sit, but it’s absolutely worth your time if rocky subject matter doesn’t deter you. It’s an unflinching, uncompromising, and utterly enthralling piece of work.

“Stonemilker” opens the record with a soft, aching clarity. Strings swell around Björk like a rising ocean tide, while her voice asks for simple reciprocity. “Show me emotional respect,” she says at one point, though you can’t be sure if she’s directing that request at her ex-lover or at the demons circling the wagons inside her own head. Later, “Lionsong” trembles with a creeping sense of dread, as if she recognizes too late that the relationship was over long before the breakup occurred. Then there’s “Black Lake,” a ten-minute descent into an emotional abyss. Her voice fractures, her breath catches mid-sentence, and the strings seem to quiver and then crumble around her under the weight of her plight. It’s one of the most harrowing pieces of music she’s ever recorded.

All that said, Vulnicura eventually reaches beyond despair. Over the course of the album’s second half, she begins to forgive and rebuild. “Family” reframes her lost love as a legacy to be admired, albeit with some sense of remove, while “Mouth Mantra” turns her trauma into a kind of twitchy propulsion, thanks in large part to Arca’s production. This LP marked the first of several collaborations between her and Björk, an artistic pairing that, while somewhat unprecedented at the time, has certainly paid creative dividends for both women.

Arca has since called Björk “a musical inspiration,” adding that “the way she exists as a human is a big influence on the way I exist as a human.” On the Vulnicura press tour, Björk called the experience of making this album with Arca “the most fun music-making I’ve ever had, with the most tragic subject matter [...] It’s the quickest I’ve ever worked [...] It’s one of those crazy things in life where people from opposite ends meet, and you’ve got so much to teach each other.”

In her most vulnerable hour, Björk found her purest voice.

2. Homogenic (1997)

If Debut and Post were the sound of boundless creative energy and freedom, Homogenic is the sound of singular, frigid focus. It remains one of her most jaw-dropping studio efforts, with a tracklist that resonates more deeply and thoroughly even as it keeps you at arm’s length for a good chunk of its running time. What’s remarkable is how it creates that sense of brooding and stretches out maddening amounts of tension without the eclectic detours she’d become known for to that point in her career. Song after song, you hear the disillusionment and exhaustion in her voice for the first time. Coming off a grueling tour in support of Post, songwriting had become a form of therapy for her, an inward retreat that only intensified after she was targeted by a stalker who mailed her a letter bomb that was delivered while she was in the residence.

After fleeing to Málaga to escape the unwanted media attention, she ended up recording Homogenic in its entirety while abroad there. In many walks, the resulting material could still be presented almost as an anti-Björk album, but one that only she could make. “Hunter” slinks out of your sound system with this skittish menace, the militaristic strings giving her voice this unflinching sense of power and control. “Pluto” navigates similar territory, with subtle tempo changes that ratchet up the feeling of discontent, while “Bachelorette” treats romantic melodrama like ancient mythology, featuring orchestration so immense it threatens to split your brain and eardrums in two. Oddly enough, my personal favorite of this top-tier record is “Jóga,” an earnest ballad that ranks as one of her most stirring creations.

As would become her custom in the years that followed, Björk would always make room for hope to flicker through those venetian blinds that keep many of her soundscapes perpetually dark. Exhibit A for that switch-up would be the sublime closer, “All Is Full of Love.” After more than half an hour of tectonic emotional shifts, it’s a soft exhale that serves as a reminder that, even if everything feels like it’s collapsing around us (sound familiar?), rewarding human connection is still possible, and it always will be. Beyond being a beloved album many regard as her best, Homogenic is also the LP that defined the contours of her worldview moving forward. It’s electronic and formal, but also somehow organic and alive. It can devastate and heal you in equal measure. From that point on, her approach to musicmaking would never be the same.

1. Vespertine (2001)

Here it is, the crown jewel in one of the most impressive discographies in alternative music. Released in 2001, Vespertine is Björk’s most voluptuous and hypnotic record, one that’s in the throes of tender, contented love. She made this album as her relationship with now-ex partner Matthew Barney was blooming, and you can hear that newfound intimacy imbue every note. That domestic comfort seems to have been both a creative safe haven and a stark contrast to the ugly stories that have since surfaced about her time working on the Lars Von Trier film Dancer in the Dark. She described that acting gig and the accompanying soundtrack as “the day job,” while Vespertine served as “the hobby.” Those powerful life events pushed the songs in new, sometimes surprising directions. What began as a goofy record about humdrum everyday minutiae evolved into a statement about this great love that, while it lasted, burned bright.

One of the many arresting facets of this LP is how Björk captured her world in what she called “microbeats”: found-sound artifacts that were then chopped up and used as minuscule samples to create rhythm. Breaths, laptop keyboard clicks, and ornate music boxes are but a few of the objects that worm their way into the arrangements on Vespertine, giving the record this unmatched sense of being lived in and familiar, even if you know nothing about Björk or her oeuvre. Songs like “Hidden Place” and “Pagan Poetry” have this unmistakable glow to them, so present yet so unassuming that, on several occasions, they prefer to whisper their confessions to you rather than belt them out. The latter in particular takes on an almost hymnal quality, which is amusing considering that it’s about sexual pleasure as well as a pagan ritual that makes her want to “hand [herself] over” to the object of her desire.

Listening to Vespertine is to be put under the spell of a perfect album. Every sound sparkles with an alluring sensuality that never overplays its hand and devolves into showiness. The amount of small, handcrafted moments it conjures up is unparalleled, both in Björk’s discography and in alternative music, period. It’s proof that nuance can be far more effective than hitting your audience over the head with a large, blunt instrument of a track. In a career overflowing with daring, maximalist wonders, this release delivers her most accomplished work at its lowest volume, which is saying a lot, especially for an artist of her pedigree.

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What’s your favorite era of Björk’s career? Let me know in the comments.