Björk Releases New Single ‘Ancestress’, A Tribute To Her Late Mother

September 23, 2022

Björk has continued the build-up to her new album, Fossora, sharing new single ‘Ancestress’. The track is one of two songs on the artist’s forthcoming tenth album said to be a tribute to her mother, who passed away in 2018.

Continuing with the more organic sound explored on recent single ‘Atopos’, ‘Ancestress’ features contributions from Björk’s son, Sindri Eldon, who helped with the vocal arrangement. Announcing the release on social media, Björk explained that the track had been written “just after her [mother’s] wordly funeral”.

Björk – ‘Ancestress’

“This song is a letter to my mother, her story seen from my point of view,” she explained. “It is written in chronological order, the first verse is my childhood and so on.”

Björk explained that ‘Ancestress’ was unwittingly inspired by an Icelandic song named ‘Grafskrift’, which she described as “a very direct and patriarchial account of someones life.” For ‘Ancestress’, Björk wanted to approach the subject matter “in a more feminine way,” telling her mother’s “biological and emotional story, not her professions, partners or dates of birth and death.”

The song comes with a video directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, which depicts Björk’s vision for how to satisfactorily honour a person’s life. “For 20 years I have not been able to attend funerals as something in them rubbed me the wrong way,” she wrote on social media.

“Possibly a big part of it is after having lived a life of thousand concerts, I probably have too strong ideas on how a ritual should be, what kinda sound, musical structure, words, and it took me all this time to discover that for me all funerals should be outside.”

She continued, “Probably what was offending me most was how can one set off the spirit in such a claustrophobic environment as a church? When the soul sets off, it needs to be outside so there is room for how enormous it becomes when it merges with the elements.”

Fossora is set for release on Friday, 30th September.