But then the guys come and chop everyone’s heads off.” Björk didn’t fancy that bit, so “I decided I’m going to change the ending. The thread between the tales was a story of escape, where women break out from a society that oppresses them, steal flutes and run with their children to a new place: “And they live very happily for, I dunno, two-thirds of an album. He found tales “from South America, Amazon tribes, and Africa, and Indonesia, and China, and Icelandic mythology”. This idea came partly because she wanted to use flutes, and her friend James Merry dug out flute myths from around the world. ījörk thinks of her utopia as an island, perhaps one that was created out of an eco-disaster, an island where plants have mouths or hover like hummingbirds or grow out of your hands. To create the album, Björk was inspired by Peach Blossom Spring, a Chinese tale of an isolated, idyllic community where people live in harmony with nature.Īnd you escape to an island, and there’s a lot of women there with children, and everybody’s playing flutes, and everybody’s naked, and there’s all these plants you’ve never seen before and all these birds you’ve never heard before, and orchids, and it has that feeling of pioneering into a new world. Yes, there are moments that are very euphoric and happy, but then there is also-like in all sci-fi films and stories that humans have made about the perfect place-that moment when two thirds into the story, the tail of a dinosaur knocks on your door and you have to deal with it. If it were just happy songs, I would have called the album ‘Paradise’ or something. In an interview with Icelandic website Grapevine, she further said that the album not only consists of happy songs, otherwise she would have called it ‘Paradise’: And this is my proposal, mine and Alejandro’s. I think if there ever was urgency or necessity to come up with another utopian model, how we’re gonna live our lives, I think it’s now. We have Trump, we have Brexit, we have our issues in Iceland, we have our environmental issues. I kind of like the fact that it’s a cliché, that word it has a fascistic, ‘I want the world to be like this!’ feeling about it, because it’s a proposal (of) how we can live with nature and technology in the most optimistic way possible. I can’t think of anything better! If I change my mind five minutes before the album cover goes into print, that might happen. I have had thousand name suggestions and I think it’s gonna be called ‘Utopia’. The same day of the single's release, Björk announced the album's title, Utopia, during an interview with Nowness, stating : The lead single, "The Gate" was announced on 12 September for a digital release the following week but received a surprise midnight release on 15 September. The announcement coincided with Dazed's autumn 2017 cover issue with Björk which included the announcement of few song titles. The album was announced via social media on 2 August 2017 with a handwritten note by Björk. like divorce." Speaking to Fader in March 2017, filmmaker and collaborator Andrew Thomas Huang said that he had been involved with Björk on her new album, stating that "quite a bit of it" had already been written, and that the "new album's gonna be really future-facing, in a hopeful way that I think is needed right now."
In an interview published in March 2016, Björk likened the writing to "paradise" as opposed to Vulnicura being "hell. Upon winning the award for International Female Solo Artist at the 2016 Brit Awards, Björk did not appear as she was busy recording her new album. 5.1 Utopia Bird Call Boxset USB editionījörk began working on Utopia soon after releasing Vulnicura in 2015.