(Credits: Far Out / YouTube)
It takes a lot to be vulnerable in music. Given the nature of the job, most artists seek to protect themselves from the dangers outside, ensuring their hearts remain locked in cages to keep them safe from any potential hazard. Sometimes, this approach crosses over into the music, and playing it safe becomes a survival tactic to ensure ambiguity does not stand in the way of reality. Björk has always ventured in the opposite direction.
It’s likely that anybody could pinpoint any moment in Björk’s discography and unravel layers upon layers of intimate confessions. In Björk’s world, there’s no such thing as maintaining distance between the artist and the listener, making most of her songs feel like delicate whispers from the pages of the singer’s diary. From heartache and loss to instinctual desire and nature, Björk knows what it means to be vulnerable.
Still, one of the more notable moments, which saw Björk channelling what she described as “complete heartbreak”, was Vulnicura. Written during an intense period of healing after a breakup, the record celebrated the art of a heart in flux, no matter how messy or flawed it may seem. In this particular world, therefore, existing as a human, pure, simple, and imperfect, was the main source of beauty, which is also incidentally an approach Björk understands better than anybody.
After all, many of Björk’s peers are perfectionists – understandably so – most assuming that putting out fully-formed music means it’s guaranteed to be liked. With this record, however, Björk pushes the idea that to be flawed is to be real. As the album’s producer, Arca, put it: “The way she exists as a human is a big influence on the way I exist as a human.” Thus, Vulnicura wasn’t just about what someone goes through during a breakup.
It was also an ode to the “dialogues we may have in our heads and in our hearts”, as Björk recalled, when nothing else makes sense. Incidentally, this is also the truest definition of heartbreak: not knowing who we are or supposed to be when we need clarity the most. Many of the songs trace these lines of fracture, including ‘Stonemilker’, which Björk used to channel the frustrations she felt trying to gauge someone else’s emotions.
Even in the less obvious songs, like ‘Lionsong’, Björk navigates the ambiguity of feeling lost in a relationship, yet realising that she didn’t seem too worried about the outcome either way. In her words, it was “cathartic”, though likely in a completely different way than the emotionally charged ‘Black Lake’, which saw the singer entering an aggressive patch in a far more forthcoming manner. As she sings in the song, “My soul torn apart, my spirit is broken.”
And, through it all, she delivers the same heartfelt vocal delivery that defines most of her more intimate work. From start to finish, Vulnicura is a rage room filled with shards of glass, fragmented at the hands of Björk’s own fragility as she desperately reaches out to grasp salvation. Though delicate in practice, Vulnicura also presents an artist fearless in the face of transparency—a passionate display of a naked flame not yet put out by the cold waters of relief.
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