Björk is exceptional at technology. She has used cutting-edge music software to escape hierarchical systems, worn masks 3D-printed from her own face, and hawked albums via a form of currency most of us still only pretend to understand. Unsurprisingly, Björk doesn’t have time to use tech like the rest of us basics. Facebook? Björk goes for walks. Tinder? She is Tindered to life.
“I’m dating life,” the Icelandic icon has revealed to The Guardian ahead of her new album, Utopia, which finally drops next Friday. “I’m like: ‘Oh, those are new hands and I’ve got new legs and new… it’s a feeling of… It feels like a new adventure.’” Björk isn’t totally against dating apps. She’s just wary of them replacing the scary-but-important act of hitting on people IRL. When she called Utopia “my Tinder album,” Björk was speaking to the excitement and anxiety of new encounters. “Yes, because I thought that was hilarious,” she now says about the creative genre tag, “but obviously I would never be able to be on Tinder.” (If she changes her mind, she already has perfect profile pic.)
Tinder isn’t the only thing Björk has compared Utopia to. Elsewhere in the interview, she compares the new album to a lush island where plants look like the three-eyed fish from The Simpsons, and a “D.I.Y. fortress” away from Donald Trump. But while Björk is otherworldly, she’s not escapist, and still has hopes for the world we live in now. What gets her particularly excited is the erosion of antiquated (and patriarchal) ideas. “What is exciting is that boys are really changing now,” she says, referring to women, like herself, speaking out against sexual harassment. “Boys who are now in their teens, they’re really emotional. That’s maybe the thing that needs to be addressed next.” The death of toxic masculinity is a big thing to predict, but Björk’s oracular skills have rarely proven defective.