Bjork

Bjork – Hyperballad (included on the album "Post", 1995)

Bjork turned thirty in 1995, and celebrated by releasing "Post", for the British label One Little Indipendent. Setting aside the self-titled 1977 album (a genuine music-industry curiosity, released when the artist was just 11 years old and an instant sell-out, though ultimately a forgettable record) and the countless productions with other projects (most notably the Sugarcubes, whose voice and leader she was from 1986 to 1992), this is her second solo album. It's a work that in some ways feels transitional, sitting between the exuberance of "Debut" (1993), which brought her worldwide success, and the full maturity of a masterpiece like "Homogenic" (1997). With these three albums, the Icelandic musician traverses and defines the Nineties, in many ways the decade in which pop music found both its most exuberant and its most melancholic tones.

When "Post" comes out, the Seattle sound is in the darkest phase of its arc: it's the year of a fantastic work, "Above" by Mad Season, which also sounds like an epitaph for that whole era. London-made rock explodes, with a milestone like "(What's The Story) Morning Glory" by Oasis. Meanwhile Aphex Twin has imposed his mad universe of glitch and ambient on the world; the euphoria of globalization, and its backlash, gives rise to a thousand experiments in cross-contamination, from Rage Against The Machine to Manu Chao. It's also the decade of retromania, from trip-hop to the eclectic experiments of artists like Jim O'Rourke and Tortoise.

Bjork absorbs all this and more, and the very title of her mid-decade album reveals an awareness of coming after this whole tangle, of somehow having to reckon with it. And yet she moves through her artistic path with great focus and consistency. She lets herself get her hands dirty, but never loses her footing, deepening her mash-up of electronics and pop, folk tradition and Stockhausen-style experimentation, melodrama and video art.

"Hyperballad", the fourth single released from the album, is widely regarded as one of the most beautiful songs of the Nineties, and beyond. It is indeed one of those tracks capable of capturing the spirit of the times — not merely documenting the present, but grasping its deepest undercurrents, everything that remains obscure in the moment and waits for the future to come clearly into view.

What strikes you first is the song's formal perfection, owed in large part to Nellee Hooper's production: his touch was already present in much of Bjork's earlier work, especially in "Violently Happy" from the previous album, whose distinctive techno pulse also echoes here. Although "Hyperballad" is a very "sensual" piece, closely exploring very precise physical sensations, the beat accompanying the three descending chords of the first section isn't yet as deep, chthonic and volcanic as the one that will characterize all her later work, immersed in an earthbound, panic-stricken dimension. Preceded by a bed of strings, itself made strange by a very mechanical bass line, it's instead a muffled pulse, built from a snare gently brushed and a kick accent on the downbeat. With the same delicacy, almost furtively, other sounds creep in — glockenspiel and barely-there scratches. Even when the song begins to open up in the chorus, the atmosphere never stops feeling inward-looking, navel-gazing, as it will in so many other Bjork gems (I'm thinking especially of the intimacy of "Cocoon").

It's on the second pass that all the energy built up so far explodes. As the chorus comes back around, the track undergoes a kind of metamorphosis, a qualitative leap, and the sweetness and melancholy of the ballad reveal themselves as an euphoric techno dance. It's not really a shift, but a growth: it's the most intense love unleashed on the dancefloor. From here on, the techno beat progressively enriches itself with further rhythmic counterpoints, before gradually draining away; and the track fades into a quiet bed of strings.

But this formal perfection is matched by content of equal weight. As is well known, even just from the splendid video directed by Michel Gondry, one senses that the song tells, in the first person, of someone who lives "on a mountain, right at the top", and every morning, early, goes to the edge of the cliff and lets "small things, like car parts, bottles, and silverware" fall. She stands there watching them destroy themselves, listening to the sound of their impact; she even imagines being in the place of those things smashing to pieces, wondering whether, when her body finally lands and comes to rest, her eyes will be open or closed. And so, after this imaginative plunge into destruction, she can go back home, into the arms of the person she loves, and feel, now, truly safe.

Warning: this is not something you should do — don't throw trash off mountains.

And yet there's something in this composition that interests us greatly. Years ago, Bjork was already offering us something that has all but vanished from music as much as from everyday life: the experience of the hyperbolic. The only "hyper-" that manifests itself in pop culture over the last few decades is that of hyperrealism. Beyond all possible distortions and all possible fakes, in fact, music and everyday experience today are nothing other than what they are: everything is present, presence is everything, and there's no further layer beneath it. From ever more perfectionist music to the voyeurism of infotainment, our experience today skates across the surface of the obvious, the ostentatious, a plane where emotion, ecstasy, stepping outside oneself, finds no room.

The form and content of "Hyperballad", by contrast, try to break through this surface, this continuous "flow", as it would come to be called more than twenty years later. The aesthetic of flow, in fact, is what we experience when we scroll through the screens of our devices, a dynamic that can, in principle, go on forever, with no destination, no ending, blind repetition. Bjork, who sensed this tendency coming, reclaims the value of catharsis, of the imaginative annihilation of self and world, in order to return, to herself and to the world, stronger and more aware. Finally safe, as the song keeps repeating. Here, catharsis becomes one with dance, it is contact — or at least an attempt at contact — with a point of immediacy: the body that falls and comes to a stop, the opposite of the endless scroll.

This artist's greatness, and the beauty of this song in particular, lies in the fact that the leap toward cathartic rapture has nothing archaic about it. Even in all her later Dionysian experiments, when she digs into the earth in search of a deeper pulse, she never does it to return to some primitive universe, but to search for a passage toward another kind of experience, a non-human one.

So we can understand the song's title in light of the ascending, then cathartic, arc described above. That techno acceleration and the quiet fade that follows are the hyperbole we ride for 5 minutes and 21 seconds, before heading home, now, truly safe.

We live on a mountain, right at the top

This beautiful view from the top of the mountain

Every morning, I walk towards the edge

And throw little things off

Like car parts, bottles, and cutlery

Or whatever I find lying around

It’s become a habit, a way to start the day

I go through all this

Before you wake up

So I can feel happier

To be safe up here with you

I go through all this

Before you wake up

So I can feel happier

To be safe up here with you

It’s early morning, no one is awake

I’m back at my cliff, still throwing things off

I listen to the sounds they make on their way down

I follow with my eyes ‘til they crash

I Imagine what my body would sound like slamming against those rocks

And when it lands

Will my eyes be closed or open?

I go through all this

Before you wake up

So I can feel happier

To be safe up here with you

I go through all this

Before you wake up

So I can feel happier

To be safe up here with you

I go through all this

Before you wake up

So I can feel happier

To be safe up here with you

Safe up here with you

Safe up here with you

Safe up here with you

Safe up here with you

Safe up here with you

Safe up here with you

Safe up here with you

Safe up here with you

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20/04/2026