An influential tapestry of techno innovation and orchestral songcraft.
Homogenic
Björk
45
“I’m the hunter/I’ll bring back the goods,” Björk intones on Homogenic’s spooky, skittering opener. In fact, the Icelandic superstar’s third album is a rippling tapestry of techno innovation and orchestral songcraft. The urgency of the lyrics is real: The singer had been deeply affected by a string of personal incidents, including the highly publicised suicide of a stalker who had attempted to assassinate her with a letter bomb. That tension manifests on tracks like the towering, string-laden “Bachelorette”—“I’m a fountain of blood/In the shape of a girl”—and siren-like ballad “Jóga”, with its urgent couplets about emotional rescue and states of emergency.
“That was the first time I was like, ‘Oh, there’s music that’s no genre.’”
Empress Of
The album soon found fans all over: Thom Yorke famously called “Unravel” one of the most beautiful songs he’d ever heard—Radiohead covered it reverently in 2007—and legendary fashion designer Alexander McQueen directed the video for “Alarm Call”, reportedly with so much enthusiasm that he provided a 100-page treatment detailing his ideas. It’s now considered a modern classic, as is the whole of Homogenic: an unforgettable melding of electronic and organic artistry, sung in the key of strange.