I'm off the coast of Iceland right now and couldn't have asked for better timing for this single drop. The mountains in the distance are every bit as jagged as these deliciously nasty beats.
Driving round Iceland last November, putting Jóga on the car radio, I felt like such a Fagurt er í fjörðum.
That last burst of energy closing out the track/video is such a rush. I love those shots of her from below, swinging her arms back and forth, ringing like a mad mushroom bell.
Hm I thought this sounded similar: (the song above is likely fan-made from "Medúlla" and "Drawing Restraint 9" vocal clips) Edit: It's actually used in her The Inner or Deep Part of an Animal or Plant Structure DVD from 2004.
But if that classifies as a hook, "I care for you, care for you" and the recurrent synth flourish on "The Gate" are hooks as well! And catchier than any repeated part on "Atopos". "The Gate" is also more structured and, well, traditional: it shares the same basic architecture of many other Björk songs. It's just very slow, very quiet, very lengthy and preceded by a long intro. "Atopos" is weirder in every way. It gets a pass because, as you said, it's bouncy, percussive and its beats simpler than the tapestry of gunshots, ghost screams and car horns Arca wove for Vulnicura and Utopia. It still commits all the pop music crimes Björk has been accused of in the last decade though. It's actually so fucking funny, one of those absurd masterpieces of comedy only life itself can come up with: her work has been dismissed as atonal, dissonant and meandering for the past 10 years even when it was light years away from sounding like the Karlheinz Stockhausen realness some listeners maligned it as, and now that it's as atonal, dissonant and meandering as ever—and delightfully unapologetic about it—it's seen as a return to form, a moment of "ah, now this is more like it!"? But that fagurts have a tendency to switch, we had already learned from the early work of leading American thinker Nicki Minaj, and that the slightest DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM is enough to loosen up the tightest, most stubbornly clenched musical recti is a proven fact of science.
The way I can’t stop picturing Toni Collette SLAMMING her head on the floor in Hereditary when the beat kicks in.
The bonkers ending kind of reminds me of the last 45 seconds or so of CUUUUuuuuute by Rosalía (a.k.a. the best song of 2022)...a potential collaboration to unite the gays of all ages there.
