Twenty years on, Medúlla is still Björk stripped down to the marrow

Björk’s visionary acapella album explored spaces many of her fans just couldn’t understand, and yet its powerful sound continues to create ripples

When in doubt, give. Isn’t that what the Björk project really boils down to? “The pleasure is all mine/ To get to be the generous one/ Is the strongest stance,” is the line she opens Medúlla with. The 2004 acapella album is, like most Björk records, structured around a series of trials between lovers; the victor of each being the one who’s most open, the one who’s most given to giving. Medúlla is Björk – her generosity of heart, her courage and intelligence – stripped down to her marrow. It’s a landmark work in her discography that benefits from endless revisitations, from giving your all to it.

And yet it never did take, not really. Fans become solemnly confessional about it: “I could never really get into Medúlla,” is a common refrain across the Björk subreddit, or, “It’s the one I’ve listened to the least.” When fans rank Björk’s discography from best to worst on TikTok or X, Medúlla almost always falls down the pecking order. To the casual listener, Medúlla signalled the end of Björk’s imperial phase, which began with 1993’s Debut and stretched into the early years of the new millennium.

Why was this new chapter in Björk’s career met with apathy, confusion or dismissal? Medúlla did indeed signal a shift in Björk’s trajectory. The album isn’t just a musical experiment, but a total reimagination of the artist-listener relationship, forcing us into an almost disturbing level of intimacy. 

Until Medúlla, her beats-focused albums had followed a logical progression: with each release, Björk grew both outward and inward, augmenting her instrumentation while also drawing ever-finer attention to each microbeat – a process that reached its endpoint with the ultra-laborious 2001 album Vespertine. After devoting so much of her solo career to beats, where else was there to go than into her own voice? 

Björk began working on Medúlla in 2002 while pregnant with her second child. She was caught between two worlds: while her body forced her into a sense of oneness with all the pregnant bodies that came before her, there was a sense of divide around her. She was living in New York City, when the trauma of September 11 had curdled into reactionary racism and jingoism. “I need a shelter to build an altar away/ From all Osamas and Bushes,” she sang without subtlety on Mouth’s Cradle. 

Repelled by the body politic, Björk retreated into Medúlla, envisioning it as a folk project composed of just voice and breath. She was inspired by pagan ideas that place a high cultural value on nature. “I wanted the record to be like muscle, blood, flesh. We could be in a cave somewhere and one person would start singing, and another person would sing a beat and then the next person would sing a melody, and you could just kind of be really happy in your cave,” she told W Magazine.

Björk invited vocal specialists into her Medúlla cave with her: Faith No More’s Mike Patton, beatboxer Rahzel, Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq, and both Icelandic and British choirs, among others (though sadly not Beyoncé, who turned down Björk’s call, but can you imagine?). Under Björk’s instruction, this ensemble captured the essence of humanity, contorting the bones and breath in their throats to form sounds that mimicked a body in labour.

Of all Björk’s albums, Medúlla comes closest to mimicking the language of life itself; the breath, the pant, the whine, the whimper, the scream, the struggle for air. Relief and reward comes briefly and at random, but when it does come, it feels life-generating. The sound of a choir singing itself to heaven. A beatboxer shaking the Earth’s core. Björk’s flute-like voice propelling every element forward. It’s an absurd combination that sounds better than ever 20 years later – and even funnier, too. 

The role of humour in Björk’s music is often overlooked. The idea of beatboxing made Björk cry with laughter, she revealed in a recent podcast. Yet 20 years before I Am Cringe but I Am Free memes, Björk was giving reverence to things that pop culture had written off as passé. Part of Medúlla’s genius is that it makes the obsolete sound timeless, making even beatboxing sound elemental.

In a contemporary review, Slant recognised that Medúlla was ahead of the curve; “but only time will tell if the album can earn a spot in heavy rotation the way Debut, Post, and Homogenic have”. We now know that it has not. But while no one’s dared to try and do their own Medúlla, you can hear its influence elsewhere: in the pops and clicks of Timbaland’s vocal-forward, mid-2000s productions (Timbaland would work with Björk on 2007’s Volta); in the eerie primordialism of Gazelle Twin’s Pastoral; and in Holly Herndon’s PROTO – an album of glitchy choral work and high-concept technofeminism that is possibly Medúlla’s greatest successor.

But the point stands: Medúlla was so ahead of its time that its influence has yet to be realised. Perhaps it requires more generosity from the listener; more giving, less doubt. As Björk sings in the album’s final moments, “The triumph of a heart/ That gives all, that gives all.”