Bjork sings it like a sorceress sharing a recipe: "Nuance makes heat." That line in "Mutual Core" neatly captures the effect of the eerie details that suffuse her eighth album: organ, squishy electronics and the high sighs of a women's choir in stark fields of echo, like a haunted digital sister of Nico's 1969 album, The Marble Index. Biophilia was partly created on an iPad and is being released as a set of apps. But in the songs, human desires and foibles echo natural phenomena: the fatal passion in "Virus," the new worlds born in "Cosmogony." And when Bjork's supernatural voice soars in "Thunderbolt" – "Craving miracles" – soul easily trumps software.

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“Youth Knows No Pain”

“Like on 'Youth Knows No Pain' — we are the ones that should demonstrate, because we can take it,” Likke Li said. “We can pierce ourselves, take Ecstasy, dance all night and still go to work at our McDonald's jobs.” Despite the hedonistic sentiment in the song, the Swedish singer also admitted in hindsight her youth had repercussions. “I remember when I was 18-19 and feeling that I know it all,” Li said. “I always feel that I know it all. But that song is about realizing you don’t, and reflecting, ‘Boy, if I only knew what would follow.’”