Why Björk tries to avoid listening to her own music: “Makes you almost go numb”

Posted On September 11, 2025September 11, 2025

Björk doesn’t really create songs in the traditional sense. She has the magical ability of fucking conjuring entire musical worlds within the span of a few minutes. 

Throughout every one of her records that are tightly slapped with the ever-inscrutable “classic” label, there is always something that seems to be coming from a completely different galaxy, but that’s usually where some of the best hooks of her career can be found. However, just because she created a masterpiece doesn’t mean she gives enough of a shit to go back and sift through the fragments of her creation, which might be hard for some fans to wrap their heads around.

Then again, it would take a lot for even some of the most self-confident (and often those with an affinity for onanism) musicians to revisit their most cherished works right after they’re finished. The mixing process can often be the time when people get absolutely sick of listening to the sound of their own voice, but even Björk didn’t have to worry about that problem since she sounded like a different artist on every one of her records.

Debut might have a few sonic similarities to Post, but there’s never a song on any of her albums that seems like it could fit on any of her following releases. ‘Hyperballad’ and ‘Possibly Maybe’ feel firmly stamped in her late 1990s period, and even if Homogenic helped build on that foundation in many respects, the whole album was launched into the stratosphere the minute that ‘Joga’ came on.

But outside of the hits that came off her records, Björk has always approached her music the same way that David Bowie used to do back in the day. Every one of her albums is a different creative endeavour, and even if she had a lot of potential to build on what she created in many respects, she would rather strike out, taking a chance on a weird idea than find herself falling back into old habits.

Granted, not going back to her albums also comes from a certain amount of fatigue after working on it, saying, “I’ve heard it so many times. I try to hear it as few times as possible, because obviously the process of mixing it and arranging it makes you almost go numb for it.” If you don’t have a reference point for what the mix of a certain song sounds like, that also gives you a sense of freedom to start back at zero all over again.

Usually, starting from scratch would be any other artist’s worst fear, but Björk wasn’t in the business to build momentum like that. Art is meant to capture a feeling of the time, and while albums like Volta do have a handful of tracks that are indebted to the sounds of the 2000s, the most interesting sides of her career come from when she’s making outlandish ideas that no one would have even touched.

Because even if someone loved the idea of making art-pop, it was going to be a tough sell for them to work on an album that was almost entirely a cappella or create an entire conceptual piece based around the individual seasons. But for Björk, these detours were simply another way for her to make music, and if she didn’t have to cater to the usual pop formulas, why should she have to limit herself to the same ho-hum verse-chorus formula?

She always worked best when she was breaking down what most people thought of as traditional music, and even if it wasn’t to everyone’s taste, it’s hard not to respect where she was coming from every time she made a new record. Anyone can try their hand at being a star, but the popularity of Björk’s music always felt like an added bonus for the brilliant work that she had done.

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