Björk Teases New Music, Turning Reykjavík Into a Glowing Exhibition

Björk is once again bending the frame of what a “release” can be. The Icelandic icon is quietly assembling new music for a forthcoming studio album, her first since “Fossora” (2022), and she’s choosing a museum, not a stage or streaming platform, to introduce it to the world. The National Gallery of Iceland confirms that fresh material will anchor one of three immersive installations set to debut during Echolalia, a full-scale exhibition opening at the 2026 Reykjavík Arts Festival.

Running from 30 May to 20 September, Echolalia occupies all four gallery spaces and positions Björk as the gravitational center of a large, multimedia universe co-developed with long-time collaborator James Merry. Among the works on view: a new installation built around the in-progress album, and two deeply personal pieces, ‘Ancestress’ and ‘Sorrowful Soil’, originally tied to “Fossora” and created in memory of her mother, environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir.

The exhibition arrives on the heels of an intense “Fossora” cycle that saw Björk touring her maximalist Cornucopia production and releasing the 2025 concert film Apple Music Live: Björk (Cornucopia). But if anyone thought she might retreat from large-scale experimentation, they underestimated her appetite for architectural sound-making. This is the same artist who, at Coachella 2023, folded a swarm of 864 drones into an orchestral performance, turning the night sky into a kinetic score. In 2024 she co-created Nature Manifesto at the Centre Pompidou, a sound installation built from AI-generated calls of extinct species, a lament for biodiversity written in frequencies we no longer hear.

Björk’s own frequency has always been restlessly tuned. Born in Reykjavík in 1965, she released her first record at age 12, then ricocheted through punk bands like Tappi Tíkarrass and Kukl before fronting the Sugarcubes, the group that carried her far beyond Iceland’s borders. After their split, she pivoted into a solo career that refused to sit still: the jazz-leaning “Gling-Gló” (1990), the synthetic-pop burst of “Debut” (1993), the hyperkinetic “Post” (1995), and the tectonic electronica of “Homogenic” (1997). She wrote “Selmasongs” for Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, then moved through the intimate ice-crackle of “Vespertine,” the choral humanism of “Medúlla,“ and the brass-driven “Volta.”

The 2010s and beyond saw her reimagining what an album can be: “Biophilia” as an educational app ecosystem; “Vulnicura” as an emotional X-ray; “Utopia” and “Fossora” as ecological and communal worlds dense with collaborators, scents, spores, flutes, and digital pulse.

Now, working largely from Iceland and remaining vocal on environmental issues at home, Björk is preparing the next chapter, one that begins not with a single, but with a room. Or several rooms, built to vibrate with whatever she’s conjuring next.