“Army of Me” by Björk

"Army of Me" kicked off the campaign for Björk's second album, Post, in 1995, and it made clear right away that this record had teeth. She wrote and produced it with Graham Massey, her main partner on most of the album, with Nellee Hooper also among the producers, Marius de Vries on keyboards and Mark "Spike" Stent mixing, and it lands like heavy machinery: a grinding, industrial lurch with her voice charging straight through it.

The fury has a target close to home. Björk drew it from her brother's damaging behaviour, and the song is her telling him to pull himself together and take charge of his own life. Critics picked up on how much darker it was than the rest of her work, and it gave her a first top-10 single in the UK.

She'd already road-tested it at a few gigs on the Debut tour, then played it on every date of the Post tour and took it to Top of the Pops with Skunk Anansie. Michel Gondry's video is a gleeful fever dream: Björk piloting a giant truck down city streets, squaring off with a gorilla dentist over a diamond he pulled out of her mouth, and dynamiting a museum to free a boy. In 2005 the song lent its name to a UNICEF benefit compilation of remixes and covers.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.