Bjork’s eighth album Vulnicura wasn’t meant to be heard until later this year, but after leaking à la Madonna’s Rebel Heart, it has had a rushed digital release. In spite of this, the production on the album excels, mixing auras that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Studio Ghibli movie with glitchy harsh interjections, running the gauntlet of the abilities of Bjork’s co-producer and FKA Twigs’ mixing artist Arca. The vocals aren’t hidden behind layers of haze but instead are crisp and full, rising above the cacophony and commanding your attention.

Bjork’s unending ability to induce seemingly cold, scientific lyrics with a voice that transforms them into the most human of wishes shines on Vulnicura, as the repeated refrain of the album opener Stonemilker is one of synchronising feelings and mutual coordinates. In this way the songs feel like an extension of her last album Biophilia, with its focus on celestial bodies and thousand year old crystals. Where that record maintained a certain distance however, the lyrics here are Bjork at her most personal. That’s the real draw: the focus on a relationship falling apart.

History of Touches is a track which presents Bjork as a collector, knowing that her time with her partner is coming to a close and filing away “every single touch” and “every single fuck” to keep safe against the oncoming storm of the breakup. The end may not ever come though, the relationship might continue but run out of things to collect — delicate, tiny emotions lost within the massive landscape of distance and silence between two people afraid to jump. The emotional honesty mustered to explore this crumbling relationship is huge, and it’s a refreshingly human achievement by an artist often presented as an otherworldly Icelandic goddess.