Björk has one of the most recognisable faces in entertainment—perhaps even the world. For nearly 40 years, her features have been snapped, filmed, digested, debated, distorted and memed, malleable iconography that has helped shift an unquantifiable number of records, tickets, official paraphernalia, bootleg merch and, for a while, gossip magazines. Over time, that face has been adorned with crowns, pearls, miniature pigtails, digital tears, stunningly creative headpieces, and, latterly, ornate veils and masks.
But at 3 PM on a late October day in East London, it’s almost completely bare, save for some thick charcoal smeared under her waterline. As Björk sat underneath a ceiling-high window, framed by a gauzy fold of white curtains, her jittery fingers rotated between a routine of clasping a cappuccino, resetting the skirt of her dress over Maison Margiela knee-highs, and tugging at the outer corners of her eyes while talking—as if they needed to be stretched to release her ideas. "Sorry, I’ve been out of practice," she muttered. "I’ve been giving really long answers."
These days, generally, Björk spends more time in her hometown of Reykjavík than she does courting the press. The Icelandic capital, violently formed by earthquakes and volcanoes, is the fertile seedbed for her avant-pop excursions—and has been ever since she started singing at the top of her lungs during long hikes to school, a natural defense against fierce blizzards whipping around her.
On most full moons, Björk still slips into Smekkleysa, a small record shop not far from her house that she’s volunteered at since the age of 14, well before she shed her Guðmundsdóttir surname. Located in the graffiti-scrawled city centre Hjartatorg, the young and eager flock there, spilling out into the streets to watch her and the growing crew of electronic auteurs in her orbit (such as Arca, Mica Levi and MUN SING) perform.
The sets typically start at 5 PM, "with classical or some atonal stuff," she said, insouciantly. "And then, with the last DJ," she continued, growing more animated, "you get a couple of glasses of champagne, play very upbeat dance music and it’s done at 9 PM." Miming someone celebrating a toast, her hands clasped imaginary champagne flutes as she demonstrated the vibe with a shoulder shimmy.
It’s rare to meet Björk in a period of downtime. Intermittent reminders from her reps to stay on schedule—first hesitantly, then urgently—spoke to the fact that the Icelandic icon is still waking out of the slumber of being off-cycle. She gestured toward the outlines of new music she’s working on, but any signs of what the next Björk album will be remain abstract. "I learned quite a long time ago that when I share what album I’m going to do, I just go home and do the opposite," she smirked.
The last four years have been consumed by presenting her elaborate biophilic vision through Cornucopia, a theatrical production that doubled as a ten-year career retrospective and the largest tour of her career. It was so laborious, in fact, that she told her manager she’d only ever do it once. In December 2023, that crowning achievement came to an end.
The Cornucopia chapter closed with a film documenting the whimsy and spectacle of the show’s Lisbon stop in 2023. Copies of her recently published 480-page book of the same name, composed of flyers and stills from the shows, sat on the coffee table between us. For Björk, these two Cornucopia releases democratise access to her ideas. "I would talk to people in my friend group," she told me about the inspiration behind the book. "Some of them follow what’s going on, but they didn’t know any of my digital work from the last 12 years."
Flipping through the book’s glossy pages, you’re transported directly into the show’s trippy digital foliage with projections of massive flowers, Björk avatars shrouded in bioluminescent light and vibrant colours that range from lava red to jungle green. When she spoke about the process of putting it all together, her lips curved into a slight, weary smile. "I’m a little bit exhausted, I can’t pretend," she said, tilting her head.
When you’re writing about Björk in 2025, people are likely to pepper your DMs with clips of her DJ sets. A rave with Arca at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris. A party in Brooklyn, with Shygirl and Jlin, set against the gnarly backdrop of Newtown Creek. Björk, now 59, has history with dance music stretching back to 1989, when she’d run away to raves in Manchester to escape the stuffiness of the rock venues she was playing with her band, The Sugarcubes. By the time she’d shifted into a solo career shortly after, the love affair was in full bloom.
On MTV’s House of Style in 1997, Björk defended dance music with the shimmery optimism of a music teacher. "If people are complaining it hasn’t got soul in it," she said, "the only reason is because no one put it there !" Even her early, much-publicised personal life could fill an electronic music novella. In the early ’90s, she had a brief and troubled relationship with trip-hop pioneer Tricky, with whom she collaborated with on 1996’s "Keep Your Mouth Shut." That same year, she became engaged to drum & bass legend Goldie, a partnership that triggered an obsessed stalker to send a letter bomb to her house.
It’s safe to say that Björk’s days are lighter now. In a recent TikTok, she unfolded "Macarena" hands over her laptop as choral music filled Smekkleysa. The caption reads : "POV : You’re in Reykjavík and stumble into a Björk Christmas DJ set in a tiny store." Dressed in a festive red suit with a face-obscuring metallic mask, she waved her hands to a rendition of "Jingle Bells," swayed to gqom and, to what sounds like video game music, mouthed, "Pow !" She pointed her fingers to the energetic crowd in time with the erratic synths, as if she was shooting lasers throughout the room. She’s been DJing since she was a teenager, but, she said with a grin, "it was never my ambition to become a DJ. It was the last thing on my list. But it ended up being this thing where, when I’m with friends or family, I’ll be the one who puts on a playlist."
Björk’s fan base spans at least three generations. Her devotees include Gen-Z Björk scholars who post uncanny imitations of her Icelandic inflection via songs about dishwashers, all manner of breathless fans who party with her under Brooklyn’s Kosciuszko Bridge and millennials who purr "that’s motheerr" over the chorus of Homogenic’s "Hunter." On the appeal of her music, Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA, whose recordings with Björk have been lost to time, might have said it best to Paper Magazine in 1997 : "You can rock it inside a techno club or on the radio," he enthused. "A lot of people, they scared to be around us sometimes, but Björk just runs around goin,’ ’Ark ark ark !’"
Björk’s world has always been coloured by extremes. In the ’70s, she grew up with her mother in a hippie community, the only child among adults who loved Jimi Hendrix and wholesome food. A lifelong introvert, her habit of singing as a self-soothing activity ultimately led to her first record deal at the age of 11. The album, a children’s record that translated songs from The Beatles and Stevie Wonder into Icelandic, made it to local radio, but didn’t travel much further.
On her 1993 breakout, Debut, she turned pop—a genre maligned at the time as an anti-intellectual cash grab—into a coming-of-age jaunt through ecstatic house, and ran with this alchemical formula through her imperial ’90s phase. Although this launched Björk the popstar, it trapped her in a cycle : make an album, talk about it to the press, go on tour and then return to the studio. In a chat with Vox that same year, she revealed this punishing schedule to be one of her biggest gripes with success.
"It’s crazy," she told the journalist. "If you make a good album, you get to make another one. But if it’s successful, you have to spend a whole year doing interviews." The interviewers, many of them men, were often openly sexist, throwing around invasive questions about her sex life while cooing, "Isn’t she so cute ?. During this time, Björk would find herself peeping into people’s homes and fantasising about the cosiness of domestic life. The simple act of cooking a family meal felt like a distant paradise.
Björk’s dreams of domesticity came to life later in her career. 2001’s Vespertine was written as she was falling in love with Matthew Barney, soon to be her husband of 14 years. While pregnant with her second child, Ísadóra, she wrote Medulla, an album made almost entirely with the human voice—even the skittering beats were spat by beatbox legend Rahzel.
While these records followed her as she built her family life, the Björk of the last decade explored the profound loss, and subsequent freedom, she experienced in her 40s and 50s. In the mid-2010s, while in the throes of her divorce with Barney, she surprised herself with a break-up album. The broken-hearted woman ? What a tired trope ! Not quite. The result, 2015’s Vulnicura, saw Venezuelan producer Arca’s jagged beats soundtrack soliloquies of emotional undoing across a record Resident Advisor called "Björk’s best album in years."
It was a fine exposition of what drives the decades-long fascination with her art : the way she bends basic form to her will. Utopia, the follow-up to Vulnicura, conjured magical visions of healing over baroque synths and mutant birdsong. Her most recent "mushroom album," 2022’s Fossora, dealt with the painful death of her mother over bleating clarinet and ferocious gabber.
While Björk can transform everyday emotions into something poetic and groundbreaking, she can also present complex ideas in an approachable way. Her inner circle paints her as someone who can talk about Kehlani and boys before sinking into a conversation about object-oriented ontology. (She’s also researched astrophysics, string theory and Jungian psychology.) "There’s never any pretentiousness or stuffiness," gospel experimentalist serpentwithfeet said over the phone. "I always leave her gatherings feeling like, ’OK, this is how you take up space as an icon.’"
Andrew Thomas Huang, the award-winning film director and Björk’s frequent visual collaborator, agreed, reflecting on the power of her universal curiosity : "To me, the wisest artists are people who can bridge high and low culture," he told me. "Being not deep is kind of a wisdom in itself, right ? We still need fine art, we still need academic discourse, but Björk’s generosity makes these big ideas accessible."
The natural wistfulness and openness with which Björk communicates her ideas has made her an easy target for the media. In a 2002 SNL skit, Winona Ryder seemed to parody an interview in which Björk fiddled with her Yamaha sampler, describing it as a device so portable that you could "write on the airplane, your gran’s house, at the top of the volcano or in a club." Ryder, performing as a Jeopardy ! contestant, brought her raspy voice to a cartoonishly high pitch, attempting Björk’s Icelandic accent as she waved a buzzer around and squeaked : "This buzzer is musical ! Everything is musical !"
A less awkward modern-day version of this sketch circulated in meme form in 2021, featuring an image of Beyoncé greeting Björk at an afterparty in London. The caption reads : "Bey : Björk, it’s so nice to see yo—. Björk : I have riddle. What can pass through trees without making rustle of the leaf ?"
By nature, Björk is silly. She giggles often. She throws obscure references at you, then before you can wallow in your ignorance, dismisses herself as "nerdy." She even shares certain Björk memes on her Instagram story—or at least I thought she did until we met. When I asked about the memes, she gave me a blank stare, before asking me to explain what I meant. Despite having an Instagram presence for years, she actually only started using the app in October 2024. Before that, "I had people running it for me," she said. Now, she admitted, she checks the app everyday. "I’m actually really enjoying it," she smiled. "I’m kind of getting into the Instagram." I asked what her Instagram Explore page looks like, and after another puzzled look, spent several minutes demonstrating how to use it.
She snapped back into work mode when the conversation turned to Cornucopia, which premiered at The Shed in Manhattan in May 2019. After a two-year interruption due to the pandemic, the tour resumed in 2022, eventually visiting over 40 cities by its close in 2023. Learning from the woes of her earlier years, she held short residencies at each stop so she could enjoy more flexible work days and spend less taxi journeys dreaming of homemaking. Today, her personal life is just as important as her work life, if not more so. "When I was maybe your age, I’d feel the weight on my back." she said, flashing me—27, the same age Björk was when she released Debut—a knowing smile. "And that actually makes it all worse, instead of just being reasonable."
Featuring primarily songs from Vulnicura, Utopia and Fossora, Cornucopia was equipped with 360-degree sound, 27 moving curtains, a flute septet and a 50-person Icelandic choir. Across 33-foot screens, alien blossoms were projected above a stage that resembled tectonic plates and streams of molten rock. Several bespoke instruments were made for the show, including a circular flute that descended from the ceiling and a three-and-a-half-tonne echo chamber that Björk could disappear into.
Around the time Björk started her Vulnicura tour in 2015, something seemed different. Once known for her strong features—hooded eyes and small lips turned into a mischievous grin or a wide, elated "O"—she began to cover her face. During the first act of the show, she wore a "moth mask" crafted out of pearls, wire and ultra-fine lace. After that, you’d seldom see her without a mask. In 2016, for a performance at Tokyo’s Miraikan museum, she wore a 3D-printed mask based on her musculoskeletal system. That same year, she arrived at her Royal Albert Hall show in a mask made up of dainty tendrils that squiggled around her face.
For years, James Merry, Björk’s assistant, creative director and mask maker, has worked closely with her to create disguises that give the illusion of something less human. When she and Merry first met in upstate New York a decade ago, they drank coffee and shared YouTube videos of weird animals. At the time, she was playing with the gamelan and a 20-foot gravity harp she helped design with Massachusetts Institute of Technology for Biophilia, her GRAMMY-winning seventh album that connected the unrestrained forces of nature to the calculated matrices of technology. Her brain was full of "science and nature and the universe and atoms and galaxies," Merry told me from his home in Iceland, where he now lives close to Björk. "That slotted in with my interests as well."
Many people have wondered : why the mask ? A quick scan of the Björk subreddit reveals regular speculation about the reason behind the cover-ups, alongside users posting that they miss seeing her naked, unembellished face. Some commenters even pose far-reaching theories that Björk prefers to cover her face because she’s uncomfortable with the aging process. On occasion, Merry receives angry comments about this on his Instagram. "I think it’s a funny demand, like, I have to see your face. You’re talking about someone whose gift to you is aural. Actually, you’re supposed to absorb her through the ears," he retorted. "If you think anyone is telling Björk what to wear, then you’re very naive."
Björk’s transformative fashion choices are, at their root, mostly artistic. "It’s not that I think everything has to be crazy theatrical. That’s not what I’m trying to do with this kind of cosplay, almost like…" She paused, struggling to land on a word. "Drag ?" I suggested. "Yes, you got it, probably better than me," she continued. "Hopefully it gives me a more versatile image of who I am. If I were doing the same things I was doing on my first album, I would be bored shitless." I posited that perhaps, at first, during the deeply painful time around Vulnicura, the mask offered a protective barrier while performing her most vulnerable songs. "That’s a really good read on it," she said. "It was a bit like a widow’s veil. I just wanted to hide—it was private. You have your creative process and then you have how you experience life."
As an artist devoted to novelty, Björk’s face coverings allow her to embody the themes of her albums entirely, making the emotions within them even more inclusive and less centred on her. The Björk of Vulnicura has less in common with the Björk of today, but the album’s themes of betrayal and decoupling will extend into the aching hearts of listeners for years to come. "That’s why I arranged Vulnicura for strings, because the album is a super human-scale, psychological kind of drama," she explained. "But I think for me, actually, what’s relatable is Cornucopia. It’s about hope, and about creating a new world after a personal apocalypse."
Björk noted a conversation she had with Professor Timothy Morton, whose philosophy suggests "all objects must be given equal attention, whether they be human, non-human, natural, cultural, real or fictional." Morton’s theories resonated while she worked out how to present Utopia on-stage. "He says the apocalypse has already happened, right ? It’s not in the future." In that case, what will happen then ? "In Cornucopia, I was like, ’OK, I’m a human, becoming a plant, becoming a fruit, becoming a human,’" she explained. "It’s a mutant energy, which for me is optimistic, because we will lose half our species. But the other half that are left, we will mutate in different ways.
Even though Björk was a late bloomer in the digital sphere, she took the reins with gusto as soon as she entered. She came into possession of her first laptop at 35, which, as a woman producer, felt revolutionary—no more dealing with sexist engineers or producers. Finally, she was the band. A decade later, 2011’s Biophilia, an album produced partly on an iPad, was released with an app that allowed listeners to immerse themselves in a galaxy of musicology, including Biophilia sheet music, options to modify songs and a suite of interactive games.
Biophilia was met with mixed reviews. Critics argued that the ambitious (and poorly designed) ecosystem she built around the album got in the way of her best skills. When it came to the actual music, there was a palpable absence of her incisive, guttural songwriting and melodies that sounded like frequencies from another planet. However, Björk’s allegiance to digital futurism in her music and visuals has spawned a generation of electronic artists building on her aesthetic movement. Collaborators like Arca and Sega Bodega rose to prominence in the mid-’10s with artificial imagery, while their music married glitchy, industrial beats with uncanny pitched-up vocals—a lineage Björk has continued to build on in her own DJing practice.
In the first week of 2025, I listened to a recording of Björk’s DJ set at East London club The Cause. Tracks end abruptly. There are several cases of out-of-key mixing. In one section, a loop of FKA twigs’ "Eusexua" clumsily makes its way across the polyrhythms of Japanese drummer mineo kawasaki’s "Rob." Björk commits to the bit. Later on, Charles Penrose’s "The Laughing Policeman" layers unhinged cackling over "Gliding," a hiccuping industrial track from her current muse, Planet Mu affiliate and formerly one half of Giant Swan, MUN SING. An uproar of "woo !"’s and laughter can be heard through the recording. The 59 minutes sound more like listening to Björk’s at-home playlist splintered into short, sharp snippets than a set you’d expect to hear on a dance floor.
Björk is well aware of her technical limitations. "I can’t mix to save my life," she said, grinning. "For me, DJing is a celebration of all genres, for all genders, races and generations. DJing is a break from myself. It’s got nothing to do with me, so I like to throw the net as wide and far as possible."
Her DJing has also elevated her to another echelon of online relatability. In a year that included Grimes’s Coachella fail and Charli xcx’s ten-minute laptop set at The Lot Radio, this new Björk era takes us back to the subculture that shaped her in the first place—without the distance you might expect. After her performance at Under The K Bridge, MUN SING, who opened the show, received a Björk tweet… from Björk. "That was the nearest meta experience I’ve had with her," he said. Rumours were flying around that the Northern Lights were visible in certain parts of the city that night—and K Bridge ravers were certain that Björk had brought them with her. "It was actually just the clouds reflecting the lights at her show," he laughed.
During the set in Bourse de Commerce last year, Björk, covered in what looked like a patchwork of alien tentacles, played several tracks from MUN SING’s debut album, Inflatable Gravestone. "That was very surreal," he said. "I’ve been a fan for years." He reached out, not expecting much, but Björk responded quickly. She asked him to fly to Reykjavík to play her full moon party.
In her hometown, he had dinner with Björk and her friends, who kindly translated jokes into English. What surprised him most was how often she pointed out new artists. "It’s nice seeing loads of younger people and people my age hang out with her," he said. "She was really gassed on loads of the music there. She was like, ’You have to check out these artists. Oh, this DJ is amazing. You have to check out this project.’ She’s still got this real enthusiasm and curiosity about new music."
Björk’s DJing has connected her to another recent muse, the avant-pop diva Shygirl. The pair played an impromptu set after they met at a dinner with Sega Bodega, an event replete with live performers and sword-swallowers. ("I’ve been proudly calling myself the David Attenborough of DJs, Björk said in an interview they did together. I’m more like a musicologist—I want to show you the little ant over here.") In 2022, Sega Bodega and Shygirl worked on a remix of Fossora’s "Ovule." Writing in her idiosyncratic internet speak, Björk raved about the song on Instagram : "it has been so nourishing sharing music with shy and sega …. Soooo honoured to be in their hands !! and in this remix admiring sega exploring chill-bassdrum-gabba."
Björk attributes her consistent interest in younger talent in part to her Icelandic origins, a nation of less than 400,000 people. For 1,000 years, Iceland underwent a period of isolation, persevering with just sheep and wild fish. Being so far removed from mainland Europe, she said, Icelanders learned that "we have to share stuff just to survive, and mostly just not die from boredom." Cliques might function temporarily, she added, but at the end of the day, you always have to face the community. "You can isolate for one week, but then you’re gonna meet everybody in the supermarket. You just have to work together, right ?"
Her friends, family and birthplace are sources from which she pulls a quiet strength, one hand always stretched toward those unwavering roots. Now that her kids are grown up and out of the house, the self-proclaimed matriarch mothers most in musical settings. On Fossora, she included the voices of her children, Ísadóra and Sindri. She also works with emerging artists that share her vision for sinuous, cutting-edge sounds, such as serpentwithfeet, who sang a remixed version of "Blissing Me" on the Cornucopia tour.
For her most recent single, "Oral," she teamed up with Catalan superstar Rosalía for a charity single (later remixed by Olof Dreijer) that raised awareness about open-net fish farming in Iceland. Some people close loops by chance, but Björk makes sure that she remains open to the promise of what’s to come as much as she honours her venerable past. She called this "teacher-pupil" exchange a vital part of her musical identity. "The older I get, the more I understand that’s what I’m made of," she told me, her voice swelling with purpose.
Her words reminded me of a Chinese legend she said she heard 20 years ago, which would later inspire Cornucopia. After a war, a group of women fled to a valley, where they defended their land by forbidding men to enter. In their new woman-led village, they healed their children, they healed society and started all over again. "Then they let the men in, one after the other, and found a new balance that was more from their perspective," she continued.
It’s impossible not to draw parallels between Björk and those fabled women. She’s a nurturer, a worldbuilder, an architect of the future. When her fans feverishly call her "mother," "queen," "mama," it’s true : Björk is the blueprint. Her reign may have begun in her feted ’90s to ’00s run, but she’s continued to lead in a mainstream cultural landscape that typically doesn’t reward innovation and openness—much less so when it’s a global superstar practicing intention and reciprocity in the music industry. Björk’s cross-generational impact across music, art and technology has established a creative torch many now carry—and it’s a dialogue she wants to keep engaging with.
"It’s important to interact with 2025, not because I’m desperate to be cool," Björk asserted. "If it comes from a place like that, it will fail." She compared this cultural exchange to a Christmas party ; a place where teenagers, millennials and grandparents all congregate. Ignoring any of these guests would be rude—you have to talk to everyone. If you’re Björk, that means you must also deal with "Joni Mitchell"—and she meant that in a good way. Before I could ask her what exactly dealing with Joni Mitchell entailed, a knock on the door signalled that our time was finally up—in fact, it was up more than an hour ago. My time with her, I realised, had been overwhelmingly generous. Björk offered a curtsy, then dashed out of sight.
