Bjork's Vespertine turns 25, an album built out of microbeats and whispers

Bjork's Vespertine, released in 2001, has reached its 25th anniversary, and Rolling Stone en Espanol has returned to it as the record where the Icelandic singer turned inward and stayed there. The magazine treats it as her masterwork, a love album whose warmth is deliberately encased in ice.

It followed a punishing stretch. Homogenic in 1997 had been loud and determined, and the fame around Post and Debut had brought two frightening incidents, an airport confrontation in Bangkok and a mail bomb sent by a fan in Miami that was intercepted before it reached her. She spent a year in Spain trying to shake off the magical Icelandic elf caricature the press had built for her, and the exhaustion deepened during her lead role in Dancing in the Dark.

The technology changed what came next. Bjork bought her first laptop, which meant she could work at her own pace and outside a studio, and she has described the freedom of being able to sing at 12:21 if 12:21 was when she felt like singing. On the Sonic Symbolism podcast she said the working title had been Domestika, and that watching families through windows from taxis on the way to airports had made her feel like an alien longing for a home of her own.

The sound came from the same domestic scale. Rather than layering synthesisers, she recorded small organic sounds herself, including picking at her fingernails, music boxes, insects, glockenspiels and harps, then amplified and edited them into the microbeats and loops that give the record its texture. She chose them partly because they held up on the primitive speakers of early computers, which is where she expected the album to be heard.

The songs work as a single arc. Hidden Place opens the sanctuary, Cocoon and It's Not Up To You lower the defences, Undo repeats its title as a mantra against trying too hard, and Pagan Poetry goes head first into obsession before Frosti and Aurora split the album in two. An Echo, A Stain carries the darkest lyric, Sun In My Mouth answers it, and Unison closes with an acceptance she sounds surprised to be capable of.

Bjork herself has drawn the pairing that explains the record best, calling Homogenic the arrogant burning masculine one and Vespertine the icy humble feminine one. Twenty-five years later the argument the magazine makes is that a laptop record built from fingernails and music boxes has aged into one of the most human albums in her catalogue, which is a useful thing to remember in any argument about electronic or pop music made on a computer.