Homogenic

After the Post tour Björk went back to her home in Maida Vale and began writing with the engineer Markus Dravs, who made the fast beat for 5 Years. The sessions were interrupted by the Ricardo López incident, and her drummer Trevor Morais offered her his studio in Málaga, where she decided to record the whole album. She wrote Jóga while home in Iceland for Christmas. Back in Spain she ended her work with Nellee Hooper because the two had stopped surprising each other, and sought collaborators in Dravs, Howie B, Guy Sigsworth and Mark Bell of LFO. Wu-Tang Clan almost contributed but were busy with Wu-Tang Forever. Bell is credited with most of the production, including Pluto, Alarm Call and the bassline of Jóga, and she named Stockhausen, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno and Bell as her biggest influences.

She composed string parts on a Casio keyboard, and Eumir Deodato transcribed and conducted the ones she did not arrange herself, played by the Icelandic String Octet. The working title was Homogeneous. She wanted the album to be about Iceland, and Dravs recalled her asking for something like rough volcanoes with soft moss growing all over them. Bachelorette was first written for Bernardo Bertolucci's film Stealing Beauty, and she wrote it and Jóga with the poet Sjón. All Neon Like contains snippets of a 1996 poem called Techno Prayer, and All Is Full of Love was the last song written and recorded.

Release and singles

The album was delayed by a month because she was behind schedule and the cover needed a reshoot. It came out in the UK on 22 September 1997 and in North America a day later. Alexander McQueen designed the cover and Nick Knight photographed it. Five singles followed: Jóga (15 September 1997), Bachelorette (8 December 1997), Hunter (5 October 1998), Alarm Call (30 November 1998) and All Is Full of Love (7 June 1999). Bachelorette reached number twenty-one in the UK, and Michel Gondry's video won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Art Direction.

Homogenic reached number four in the UK, where it spent 17 weeks on the chart, and number twenty-eight in the US. It was certified gold in the US in 2001 and in Canada in 1998. It lost the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Performance to Radiohead's OK Computer, and she won the 1998 BRIT for International Female Solo Artist. It placed ninth in the Pazz & Jop poll. Pitchfork's list of the best albums of the 1990s put it at number twenty-one in 2003, and Slant named it the best album of the 1990s in 2011. Philip Sherburne's 2017 Pitchfork review said it paved the way for Vespertine and Vulnicura and influenced Arca.