For Björk’s 10th album, an unexpectedly happy lockdown in Reykjavík, her mother’s death and her youngest child leaving the nest pushed her to consider her roots. ‘I’m a homebody,’ she concluded – as long as the local swimming pool is open
If, in the winter of 2021, you had been wandering through downtown Reykjavík, you might have registered the thud-thud-thud-thud of a lockdown house party. Squeezing her “Christmas bubble” of friends into her living room, Iceland’s most famous citizen was throwing another of her “crazy DJ nights, where 20 people could come and I always ended up DJing just gabber”.
According to Björk, the nails-hard 90s Dutch techno style is the perfect soundtrack to Covid life. “There’s always a BPM in our bodies, you know? And I think through Covid we were all pretty lazy, just sitting home reading books, so when we got drunk or partied it was like we went a little bit mental, then we just fell asleep before midnight. Slow energy, but then it goes double.” And that, she realised, is “a little bit gabber”.
