There’s probably no way we’ll ever see a Björk music video that’s just footage from a live performance, right? Over the decades she’s spent pushing the boundaries of her music, she’s been doing the same with the visual element of it as well. She shared a new song called “The Gate” a few days ago (when she also revealed that her upcoming album will be called Utopia), and now she’s released a proper video for it, which features her playing flute in an overgrown field with bizarre creatures and objects floating in the air around her.
The clip then transitions to Björk dancing with what could be described as android fairies, so this is peak Björk, basically. Andrew Thomas Huang, who created the video with Björk and Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, said of it:
“It is the first glimpse into Björk’s utopia. The doorway lies within the wound from Vulnicura, which now appears transformed into a prismatic portal channeled between the chests of two lovers. Not lovers in the quotidian romantic sense, but in a broader cosmological way. As a throughway into Bjork’s new album, ‘The Gate’ is a declaration of hope sung by a woman refracted and re-formed into a luminous whole.”
When Björk dropped the track a few days ago, she described it as a “love song”:
“But I say ‘love’ in a more transcendent way. Vulnicura was about a very personal loss, and I think this new album is about a love that’s even greater. It’s about rediscovering love — but in a spiritual way, for lack of a better word.”
Utopia is expected to drop sometime in November. Watch the video for “The Gate” above.
