The lyrics reflect the arc of a mother and daughter’s love passed through decades: As childhood memories merge with scenes of hospitals and pacemakers, Björk steps into the role of valiant “hopekeeper” for her mother while the clock ticks down (literally, there is a ticking clock in the song). Built from anthemic strings, sparse beats, a sprinkling of chimes and gongs, and vocals from Björk and her son Sindri, “Ancestress” is among the singer’s most striking songs about hope because it shows the limits of it. “Sorrowful Soil” was written before Björk’s mother passed, and “Ancestress” was written after, as a more personal eulogy. Certain phrases cut through and carry the melody: “emotional textile” (what a mother’s nest is made from, naturally), “self-sacrificial,” and “nihilism.” Björk’s mother was a nihilist, a fact that is dramatically emphasized in a vocal hook despite her nature, the musician seems to say, she did her best to raise children, an act that disregards one’s own nihilism for the future. With a baroque choral arrangement and bass chords that function like a church organ, the song sounds solemn, to be sure, but there’s something strangely funny about boiling down a woman’s life to her menstrual cycles and prevailing worldview (Björk seems to recognize this, grinning over the lyrics’ oddness in our recent cover story).

“In a woman’s lifetime she gets 400 eggs but only two or three nests,” she sings, pausing for emphasis and buoyed by women’s voices from the Hamrahlid Choir. The first, “Sorrowful Soil,” is Björk’s attempt to mimic Iceland’s traditional style of musical eulogy, consisting of melodramatic melodies delivering dry biography, but from a matriarchal POV. The most poignant songs on Fossora are the towering twin tributes to her mother, the environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, who died in 2018.

Bjork debut poster