Dancey acidy trippy experimenty. It feels like the soundtrack that should be playing over a montage of an old school chemist tossing a dash of this and a dash of that into a beaker, brightly colored fluids mixing and steaming and bubbling into psychedelic concoctions.

I couldn’t predict any of the sounds, the direction of the songs, any of it. There’s a sense that the singer knows things, like the art people who claimed to see deeper meaning in that weird-ass painting of King Charles that was all over the internet a few months ago (the symbolism is that it’s super duper red, if you didn’t notice), but Bjork isn’t trying to wall off her heightened artistic sensibilities or lord them over you, she’s trying to share them. I could almost pretend to fit in at a modern art museum with this playing in my headphones.

I don’t know many artists who could convincingly take us from the dance hall to a harpist’s chamber so convincingly without making it feel contrived. There’s no moment where it doesn’t feel like we’re getting all of Bjork, her voice and personality and limitless creativity. Her voice ranges far and wide in step with her songwriting. I could see her being a huge influence for artists in several different genres - the obvious dance-house-poppers like Robyn (and lately Due Lipa, maybe?), dream-poppers, experimentalists across disco and hip hop, and even some adventurous indie rockers. But Bjork could also be a more general symbol for artists who just want to invent without limits. It’s somewhat miraculous to me that Bjork had the commercial success she did, while not even remotely pretending to cater to a mass market audience, at least not on the surface level.

I think the biggest pop stars are usually the most approachable, and approachable can mean many things, many angles through which the audience relates to the music. Bjork’s angle of relatability is different in every song, and somehow instead of making the album unapproachable, this functions like a musical roundabout, pulling you in from all different directions and taking you for a ride around the circle until you find the exit you want and veer off in whatever direction suits you best.

From the roundup Jamwise #44 - The Best Albums of 1993, pt. 3.