Björk

Björk (born November 21, 1965, Reykjavík, Iceland) is an Icelandic singer-songwriter and actress best known for her avant-garde solo work covering a wide variety of music styles. Integrating electronic and organic sounds, her music frequently explores the relationship between nature and technology.

Early career and the Sugarcubes

The daughter of environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir and electrician and union leader Gudmundur Gunnarsson, Björk lived in a hippie commune with her mother, stepfather, and six siblings after her parents divorced. She recorded her first solo album, a collection of cover versions of popular songs, as an 11-year-old music student in 1977. Throughout her teens she performed with various short-lived bands, ending up at age 18 with Kukl, a punk group that eventually became the Sugarcubes. With Björk as lead vocalist, the Sugarcubes won acclaim in the United Kingdom with their first album, Life’s Too Good (1986). After recording two more albums over the next five years, Here Today, Tomorrow, Next Week! and Stick Around for Joy, the band broke up, and Björk embarked on a solo career.

Solo albums and acting career

After moving to London, Björk released Debut, her first international solo album, in 1993. It was a departure from the harder-edged sound of the Sugarcubes and included a wide variety of musical styles ranging from techno-pop to jazz. Debut produced a number of hit singles, including “Big Time Sensuality” and “Venus as a Boy.” Her follow-up, Post (1995), opened with the single “Army of Me,” a characteristically throbbing, synthesized track accompanied by the singer’s now-familiar breathy yodel.

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Never content to conform, Björk in 1997 released her most experimental works to date: Telegram, an entire album of Post remixes, and Homogenic, a studio effort with collaborator Mark Bell. Bell and Björk also worked together on Selmasongs, the score for film director Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000), a tragic musical in which she also starred. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, and Björk was named best actress. In 2001 she received an Academy Award nomination for best original song for “I’ve Seen It All” from Dancer in the Dark. Her attire at the Oscars ceremony—a dress designed by Marjan Pejoski that featured a faux swan draped around her neck—was one of the most iconic fashion statements in the awards’ history.

In 2001 Björk released the quiet and hypnotic Vespertine. Her first studio album in four years, it refrained from pushing the musical boundaries that had made her a star of the 1990s and instead focused on a more rhythmic, contemplative intimacy. Medúlla (2004) was an all-vocals and vocal samples-based album that featured beatboxers (vocal-percussion artists), Icelandic and British choirs, and traditional Inuit vocalists, while the similarly eclectic Volta (2007) boasted somber brass arrangements, African rhythms, and guest production from Timbaland. For the ethereal Biophilia (2011), Björk used tablet computers to help her compose songs, which were released, in addition to conventional formats, as a series of interactive iPhone and iPad apps.

Björk performed “Oceania,” a single from Medúlla, at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. She also composed the soundtrack for her romantic partner Matthew Barney’s film Drawing Restraint 9 (2005). Björk excavated the end of her relationship with Barney on the devastating Vulnicura (2015), coproduced with Arca, and she worked with Arca again on Utopia (2017), which incorporated recordings of birdsong and a flute ensemble. In 2019 Björk premiered Cornucopia, a series of multimedia performances, for the inaugural program at The Shed, a cultural institution that opened in New York City that year.

In 2022 Bjӧrk released Fossora, an album of songs inspired by the death of her mother in 2018. Featuring bass clarinet and gabba-techno beats, it received a Grammy Award nomination for best alternative music album. She also appeared in Robert Eggers’s fantasy epic film The Northman (2022) and later collaborated on several songs with Spanish singer Rosalía, notably the dramatic “Berghain” from Rosalía’s album Lux (2025).

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Other projects and honors

As a response to the financial turmoil that rocked Iceland in 2008, Björk partnered with an Icelandic venture capital firm to establish a fund that would invest in socially and ecologically responsible businesses. She was awarded the Polar Music Prize for lifetime achievement by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in 2010.