Björk’s second album turned a move to London into 11 dispatches, each in a different musical language

Most people who move to London send a few postcards home. Björk sent 11, and each arrived in different handwriting.

Post landed in 1995, two years after Debut had put a respectable distance between her and the shambolic art-punk of The Sugarcubes. Debut was the sound of someone discovering the club. Post is the sound of someone who has stopped going home afterwards.

The Icelander had swapped Reykjavík’s sparse light for the noise and neon of a city that never quite switched off, and the album captures that disorientation without trying to cure it. She described its protagonist as the wide-eyed girl from the country who has been in the city a while, consuming it as it consumes her. Nobody has summarised the record better since.

The sessions began somewhere considerably less grey. At Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, Björk ran microphone leads down to the shoreline and into caves, letting the ocean have a say in the arrangements. It sounds like an affectation. It was closer to a principle: that a voice should be allowed to breathe somewhere other than a booth. Back in London she kept adding — harps, brass, dulcimers, bagpipes, strings — until productions already straining at the seams had nowhere left to go but outward.

The title does double duty. These are dispatches, and most are addressed to someone. Army of Me is tough love for a younger brother who needed to stop feeling sorry for himself, delivered over a rhythm that sounds like a forklift reversing into a steelworks. Enjoy prowls London after dark with the lights dimmed and the pulse quickening. Possibly Maybe picks over the wreckage of a romance with the forensic calm of someone who already knows the verdict. Headphones and Cover Me turn toward her collaborators, part thank-you note and part dare.

Then there is It’s Oh So Quiet, the big-band blast that made Björk a household name in households that otherwise had no use for her. She plays it as a woman ambushed by her own pulse, whispering one bar and shrieking the next. It is, of course, a cover of a 1951 Betty Hutton recording. The album’s most famous song is the one she didn’t write, which suits a record so determined to shrug off ownership of any single style.

Post refuses to sit still. Industrial clatter gives way to string-drenched balladry, trip-hop murk gives way to jungle, and nobody bothers to warn you. One moment you are lost in a glitchy techno labyrinth; the next, a harp is quietly tidying up after it. Nellee Hooper steered most of the production, with Tricky, Graham Massey and Howie B leaving fingerprints of their own, and the mid-90s studio sheen is audible throughout. It doesn’t date the record, largely because the technology always serves the feeling rather than the other way round.

The standard line is that Post is eclectic. That undersells it. Eclecticism implies a buffet; Post argues that the buffet is the meal. Its scattershot sequencing mirrors the way a city actually arrives at you — in fragments, at volume, out of order. Critics now like to call it a prophecy of the playlist era. Perhaps. But playlists are assembled by algorithms that want you to keep listening. Post was assembled by someone who wanted you to keep up.

Holding it together is the voice. Björk moves from trip-hop whisper to full-throated roar to something that sounds barely human, treating the instrument as both narrator and special effect. The implication is that identity need not be fixed. It can bend to fit the room, or the city, or whoever is waiting at the other end of the postcard.

Homogenic and Vespertine are more coherent records, and there is a decent case that they are better ones. But neither exists without Post, which gave Björk — and her audience — permission to treat contradiction as a method rather than a flaw.

Pop in 1995 was busy perfecting its formulas. Post took them apart to see what else they could hold, and was in no particular hurry to put them back together.

Three decades on, it still reads like mail from somewhere you haven’t been. The address keeps changing. The handwriting is unmistakable.

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Did You Know?

1. Army Of Me and The Modern Things, were written before her first album, Debut, but she held on to them because she thought Debut was a quote “more gentle energy and Post was more raw, more brutal” end quote

2. Tricky agreed to be a co-producer on two conditions: one, he would work on just two tracks and, two, she would contribute two vocals for his next album. And those songs were Keep Your Mouth Shut and Yoga, which appeared on 1996’s Nearly God.

3. The vocals to Cover Me were recorded in a cave full of bats.

4. The jacket Björk wears on the cover was inspired by Royal Mail airmail envelopes, referencing the album title.

5. During the album’s commercial peak, Björk was affected by media attention and Post’s promotional tour. She assaulted a reporter and survived a murder attempt and subsequently relocated to Spain.

6. A remix album titled Telegram came out in 1996.

7. In 2020, Rolling Stone placed the album at № 289 on its list of the 500 greatest ever recorded.

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Album Review | ‘Post’ by Björk was originally published in Rock On on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Six Songs You Shouldn’t Sing Anymore rubbed a few readers up the wrong way. Some, judging by the inbox, are still singing them in my direction. Consider this a kind of antidote.

You won’t find Happy here, nor Feeling Good, nor Beautiful Day. Those songs have been worked harder than a wedding DJ and deserve a lie-in. Instead, these six offer optimism with the bruises showing: hope sung through gritted teeth, sunshine reported as news, beauty that turns out to belong to someone else.

None of them will tell you everything is fine. All of them will get you up anyway.

Sun Is Shining by Bob Marley & The Wailers (1978)

In 1999, a Danish DJ called Funkstar De Luxe gave Bob Marley a posthumous dance-floor smash. Sun Is Shining went to №3 in Britain and topped the American club chart, and a generation assumed it had always been a summer anthem.

It hadn’t. Marley first cut the song with Lee Perry in 1971, a shadowy thing, then revisited it for Kaya in 1978, the album that marked his return to Jamaica after exile in London. Lester Bangs heard tourist bait. He missed the undertow.

Listen past the sweet weather and dancing feet. The lyric is a roll call of days, morning and evening ticking past, with Marley announcing himself as a rescuer, a rainbow, a man insisting you know exactly where he stands. It is less a holiday postcard than a declaration of presence, sung by someone recently shot and newly home.

He barely performed it. In Massachusetts in 1978, he opened with it on a whim because the rain had stopped.

That may be the truest reading. Sunshine, for Marley, was never the default setting. It was news.

Beautiful World by Devo (1981)

Sarcasm works best when it is indistinguishable from sincerity. Devo understood this better than anyone in 1981, and Beautiful World is their most elegant booby trap.

Warner Bros. wanted another Whip It. Devo delivered New Traditionalists instead, darker and colder, recorded at Manhattan’s Power Station over four months. Its quiet centrepiece sounds, at first, like a greeting card set to synthesiser. Mark Mothersbaugh croons about lovely people, romantic places, the wonder of being alive. He admires how everyone combs their hair. The melody sways. Nothing seems amiss.

Then the dedication starts to narrow. The world is beautiful for you, he keeps insisting, and the repetition curdles. By the final bars the narrator has written himself out of the picture entirely, a guest at a party who has quietly realised he was never invited.

The band’s video spelled it out, cutting from kitsch Americana to riots and mushroom clouds. The song never needed the help. Its menace lives in the gap between the words and the man singing them.

Forty-five years on, the world is still beautiful. Just not for everyone.

Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues by Eels (2000)

Picture a carnival after the crowd has left. Smokestacks blackening the sky, an elephant brooding in its cage, the ringmaster strumming a Telecaster to empty seats. Somewhere a girl slips out her window because nobody at home will notice. A clown arrives at the fair with his finger on a trigger.

And every verse ends the same way, with Mark Oliver Everett swearing blind it’s a beautiful day.

Co-written with the Dust Brothers’ Michael Simpson, the song bounces along on a sunny, stomping groove that sells the lie beautifully. Everett’s tell comes at the close, when he advises trusting nobody, least of all him.

The irony extended offstage. Everett wrote it after Daisies of the Galaxy was finished and thought it wrecked the album’s flow. DreamWorks disagreed, so he tucked it away as a bonus track. It became the lead single, reached №11 in Britain and landed in Road Trip, a deal Everett later called one of his few genuine regrets.

He got his hit. He never watched the film. Some beautiful days are best enjoyed from a distance.

Gold In Them Hills by Ron Sexsmith (2002)

Optimism is cheap when life is going well. Sexsmith recorded Gold in Them Hills when it wasn’t.

His 15-year marriage had just ended, yet Cobblestone Runway arrived in 2002 sounding improbably sunny. Its centrepiece is a piano and cello ballad that plays like a man talking himself round. The bills are mounting. Luck has gone missing. Sexsmith concedes all of it, then reaches for the oldest consolations in the songbook: rain that nourishes, mountains that hide treasure, cruelty that proves kind.

Lesser writers would drown in those clichés. Sexsmith floats on them, because his melody does the persuading his lyric can’t. It climbs patiently, like someone getting slowly up off their knees.

Producer Martin Terefe brought it back to close the album, dressed in strings and synth, with Coldplay’s Chris Martin sharing verses. Their voices are so alike it sounds like Sexsmith harmonising with his own echo. The cameo should have made him a star. It made him a Coldplay trivia answer.

The charts stayed unmoved. Sexsmith kept digging regardless, which is exactly what the song told him to do.

It Don’t Matter by Donavon Frankenreiter (2004)

Some songs are built to be overheard. It Don’t Matter belongs to the bonfire, the tailgate, the hour after the last wave when nobody is keeping score.

Frankenreiter is a surfer first, and it shows. Acoustic guitar, brushed percussion, a tempo that never threatens to break into a jog. His mate Jack Johnson produced the 2004 debut alongside Mario Caldato Jr and lent his voice to the record, and the family resemblance is hard to miss. Purists heard a tribute act. Australia made it gold.

The lyric is barely there, which is the point. Frankenreiter shrugs off the noise of people trying too hard, the clutter of wanting more than anyone needs, the weight of yesterday. Indifference becomes a kind of devotion: nothing counts except the company he keeps. The refrain repeats until it stops being an argument and becomes a mantra.

It would be easy to dismiss as slacker soul. But there is discipline in refusing to escalate. In an era of anthems shouting for attention, Frankenreiter whispered, and found an audience. Turns out it mattered after all.

Follow Your Dreams by Kiwanuka (2024)

Every self-help shelf carries the title. Most of them deserve the remainder bin. Michael Kiwanuka borrows the phrase anyway, and the trick of Follow Your Dreams is that he sings it like a man who has read none of those books and lived through the chapters they leave out.

Placed late on Small Changes, it is the closest the album comes to a pep talk, though Kiwanuka delivers it at a simmer. The verses are crowded with wreckage: lies in his head dragging him under, blood in his eyes, doors that open onto nothing. The chorus doesn’t argue with any of it. It repeats, a choir answering each line with a call to fearlessness, like a congregation that has seen worse.

That is the song’s quiet intelligence. Hope isn’t a destination but a discipline, practised in the dark rather than announced from the mountaintop. Danger Mouse and Inflo keep the arrangement weightless, letting repetition do the lifting.

This is the man once urged to adopt an alter ego to sell records. He followed his dream by refusing to become someone else’s.

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Six Songs to Help You Get Out of Bed was originally published in Rock On on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.