Björk’s ninth studio album is here: a glitching tidal wave of swooping vocals and heavenly beats that blossom together to make up Utopia.

It’s an expansive collaboration with frequent musical partner Arca across a sprawling 14-track release. Speaking previously with Dazed in her Jesse Kanda-shot cover story, the Icelandic musician described it as her “Tinder album”: “it is definitely about that search – and about being in love,” she said. “Spending time with a person you enjoy on every level is obviously utopia.”

Utopia is an entirely fresh manifesto from the brutal, unflinching masterpiece that is 2015’s Vulnicura, though lives in the same universe. It’s a proposal for a new world we could live in, coming along at a time of massive political and social strife, as well as soundtracking her own fraught emotional journey with powerful optimism.

“Imagine a future and be in it … your past is a loop, turn it off,” she asserts on “Future Forever”, pushing the galaxy-dappled dream of a paradise that’s just within her grasp. The album includes her previously released singles “The Gate” and “Blissing Me”, which both have stunning music videos directed by Andrew Thomas Huang and Tim Walker/Emma Dalzell. 

As always, the most moving moments are in the avant-pop renegade’s detail: the gorgeous thought on courtship via technology threaded through “Blissing Me”, “two music nerds … sending each other MP3s,” she sings. There’s the all-women flute ensemble, birdsong, celestial harps and chorus of Björk’s audacious enunciating of her ‘R’s and ‘T’s, and a masterful production level that oscillates between slick metallic beats and extra-terrestrial forest floor sounds.

Listen to Björk’s excellent new album below, and read back on her cover story here.