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Pitchfork: Björk is Full of Love Again - Where Vulnicura painted black lakes, barren landscapes, and frozen rooms, Utopia seeks out a lush island where love is abundant and given without condition or hesitation - Utopia is saturated with a honeymoon glow, even as it occasionally calls back to darker moments from across Björk’s career - Some of the bird sounds on the album were recorded at her cabin in Iceland; "There are a couple of pairs of Arctic Loons that live just outside there. They’re really beautiful and huge. They obviously ended up on the album." - Björk wrote 60% of the album on her own and Arca 40% - “The Gate is the bridge from one album to the other, in a way, even though I didn’t write that song first. The wound featured in almost every video for Vulnicura changed into a gate that you can love from. Then the rest of the songs are in a new place." - Arisen My Senses is the first song she wrote for the record; "The melody’s like a constellation in the sky. It’s almost like an optimist rebellion against the normal narrative melody. There’s not one melody. It’s like five melodies. I really loved that." - "When I was writing Utopia and still singing the Vulnicura songs, I felt like I was having an affair from my own grief. 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." - "There are definitely songs on this album which are about platonic love and then there’s also real romantic love, all the way. And also maternal love. It’s a real mixture." - Björk on collecting mythological stories and books about utopia; "It was really satisfying to discover that a lot of the stories were about women in the tribe stealing the flutes. They escaped with the children and went to a utopian place. Sometimes they got found out and something terrible happened, like violence. But in some stories, they managed to create a world where there was no violence or war. I was really excited by that. I also think people who end up being flute players are such interesting characters. They’re always eccentric." - "There were definitely three stages [of writing]. There’s the utopian, futuristic, sexy part where we’re heading off to this island where everybody’s naked and there’s no violence, like a sci-fi novel. We were reading these black lesbian sci-fi books and really going off into that direction. The second part is more real and human. And then in the third section, songs like Body Memory and Loss are more of a continuation of previous albums." - "Loss is very much a continuation of Pagan Poetry, a certain sort of girl goth music." - "And Body Memory was a really strange song for me. I did not know what to do with that song. In the beginning it was 20 minutes long, and I ended up recording a 60-piece choir [the Hamrahlid Choir] on it." - "Black Lake on Vulnicura was the darkest and saddest I’ve ever gone. Body Memory is a reply to that. It is my manifesto. My subconscious was like, “OK, I’ll let you write the saddest song ever for 10 minutes if you then write something to counter that.” And then this song came out all in one go. Each verse is about big things in life: destiny, love, sex. It’s a bit big-headed. It’s about, “OK, how am I going to live the second half of my life?” It’s a new territory, a door that’s opened."

Yaass it's officially growing on me! Björk also updated a video for the song on Facebook which is simple but beautiful, go check it out!

My thoughts exactly sis

Boy does the song have Vespertine written all over it, which I listened in full last week after a long time and found boring towards the end. Maybe Blissing me just needs some time to grow on me but honestly I don't think I'll be giving this one much attention once the full record's out. I wasn't really looking forward to the track before since the others sound more exciting compared to its description and I can't say that I'm really bouncing off the walls now either... I like the beat and the lyrics are really cute and all and the song's okay but I feel like it just lacks something. I've listened The Gate over 200 times and it's still so fucking good and I can't get enough of it, whereas I'm kinda meh with Blissing me after 8 listens which is a shame. Though I'll probably force myself to listen to the song for the rest of the morning to see if I'll warm up to it.

https://nytimes.com/2017/11/14/arts/music/bjork-utopia-interview.html?referer=https://4um.bjork.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=27150&p=1218833

Apparently the release date is Nov 16/17 for some reason on iTunes Australia/NZ and people are speculating an early release. 4um mod also posted a message earlier this week, hinting that something might be coming but deleted it shortly after... so people are wondering if they're trying to avoid a (Vulnicura-like) leak and if 24th is just for distraction. We know for a fact that OLI and Björk stores are shipping out the CDs later this week so... I dunno. Fingers crossed tbh, 24th is so close yet so far.

New interview with The Guardian and two new promo pics Utopia-focusing summary of the interview - One song takes usually a month to write, sometimes two; "usually the whole picture of an album doesn’t emerge for her until very late in the process" - Björk describes Black Lake as the saddest song she's ever written - "I wanted this album to go towards the light." - Björk and Arca "took small elements they liked from Vulnicura, passed sounds they liked to each other via email (melodies from South American flutes, singers from Cambodia) and played with them" - Interviewer on the album; "The result is exceptionally beautiful. Utopia is overwhelming, lush and gorgeous, with harps and flutes and real-life bird calls, a magic forest of constantly changing sound. There’s an ebb and flow dynamic, like the turning of swallows in the sky. Sometimes Björk’s voice is at the fore, sometimes it’s woven in, just another instrument. This is not really an album of pop songs, although you might find one or two, at a push; it’s more orchestral and detailed, all-enveloping." Also "I don’t know that I got all this from one listen, though the sense of wildlife, physical space and bliss was very strong. My notes say things like “epic, full of nature”, “rattle (monkey sounds)”, “flutes gorgeous, beats tough, transcendent"." - Björk thinks of her utopia as an island, perhaps one that was created out of an eco-disaster, an island where plants have mouths or hover like hummingbirds or grow out of your hands. - Tabula rasa lyrics: “break the chains of the fuck-ups of our fathers” - Blissing me lyrics: “I fall in love with his song” - Sue me is about "the feeling of the end of a difficult relationship, of moving forward" - On mixing Utopia: "But the mixing of this album was really tricky. You know, without trying to sound too pretentious, it was not necessarily about the events but the filters around the sound. The juxtaposition of the flutes and the electronics and the voice and the birds. It’s really delicate. If it’s wrong, the whole thing just tips… It took me three months to mix the album.” - She thinks of Utopia as having three parts. The discovery of the island, the living there day to day, and then, more prosaically, how humans survive difficult times. - Body Memory: about how your body can get you through trauma when your head and heart can’t. It was sparked by another day she spent at her cabin, this time by herself. She wrapped herself in loads of coats, lay down on the moss, and listened to an audiobook of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. She’d been aware of the book for a long time but had dismissed it as “a bit goth”. This time, though, she found it stimulating, especially the final part. “It’s about having people who are experts in dying,” she says, “who have physical practice to help you to die. Like yoga exercises. Breathing exercises… Like death doulas. I was so impressed by this.” And so she wrote Body Memory to remind herself that she is able to move through grief, get past Vulnicura and survive. She wrote six verses, to herself, about “destiny, love, another about sex, another about motherhood, one verse – and this has been a struggle for me – is urban, another rural nature”. The verses are reminding her not to think too much, “not be neurotic, just do this”. “It’s my version of helping myself, suggesting you have it all in you, you have all the answers. Without sounding mushy. It’s like my manifesto. Let’s do this!”

I wake up every morning hoping they've made an announcement of a promo track even had a countdown in my dream a few days ago but I just woke up when it hit 0:00 lol

Tracklist confirmed on musicdirect, according to the staff of OLI/Björk's store the CDs will be shipped about a week before the release date - which means this time around I might just get a record on its actual release date It took a week for them to deliver my The Gate vinyl so I'm hopeful, fingers crossed

She definitely is, and by that I might just mean the album... Update: ok they're fake lol

New updates in bold.

lmao

Télérama cover, from the same Maisie Cousins shoot as the Interview one a while back. Also it's now been confirmed that Arca has been credited as co-writer on 5 tracks and Sarah Hopkins on one. Apparently promos have already been sent to reviewers but hasn't been confirmed to be actually true - at least quite yet.

Me too I really hope we'd get at least a promo track before the album release date, I'm craving for the music so much - - Björk will be on BBC Radio 3 next Tuesday!

Here's a short summa summarum about the record, with some excerpts from the Reddit guy's notes in case they haven't been shared here yet (LB is kinda slow for me today so I won't bother looking pages back lol) - read at your own risk. Not gonna go through much of the interviews for info this time but will update as time goes by and more info etc. surfaces. New promotional pics by Santiago Felipe

There's a photo of the tracklist written in japanese floating around and people on 4um have tried translating it; *definitely confirmed titles **semi confirmed titles, mentioned/rumoured earlier, supported by japanese titles I'm not sure if there's been any discussion about a reddit post that was written by someone who somehow had heard the album already, but so far he's been correct with The Gate being the third track and there being 14 in total. This is not word-for-word and I don't remember it 100% but he also said something about the sound/storytelling of the album being divided like in a vinyl, and with these lengths the LP tracklist probably looks like this; A arisen my senses blissing me the gate B utopia body memory C features creatures courtship loss sue me D tabula rasa claimstaker paradisia saint future forever

Digipak release is a 6-panel soft pack with a 12-page booklet and a poster. Jewelcase release doesn't have the poster. Peach colored vinyls are exclusive to Rough Trade, limited to 5000 copies. https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/music/bjork

So the tracklist looks something like this 01. arisen my senses 4:59 02. xx 5:05 03. the gate 6:33 04. xx 4:42 05. body memory 9:46 06. xx 4:49 07. xx 4:44 08. xx 6:51 09. xx 4:57 10. xx 4:42 11. xx 3:18 12. xx 1:44 13. xx 4:41 14. xx 4:47 Total runtime: ~71:38 Other track titles to appear on the record Confirmed: features creatures, blissing me, loss Not yet confirmed: allow

no... i tried finding it and the Stonemilker one some time ago as well but basically the Wikipedia descriptions are all there is. - - The album version of The Gate has the sound effects heard in the video mix.

UTOPIA the new album conceived by björk & arca OUT 11.24 Finally!!! come thru queen OLI has removed the bit about luxury edition on their site so we shall see if it's scrapped or if they're just getting it ready before announcing it.

A 3:56 edit of The Gate is now up on streaming services! And it seems that the flute outro version is exclusive to the vinyl release only.

Lmaoo they delayed the box set to December? Good thing I cancelled mine weeks ago

Received mine today

saw someone on Instagram who was disappointed by the vinyl not having "a cover". Like what the fuck were you expecting

Quite ugly and definitely not worth the money lol