(Sorry, gang, One Little Indian asked me to take down the file. Your best bet is to see if it’s available through the iTunes Store, where I’m told the single was released a couple of days ago.)

If you’re a Björk fan, chances are you fall into one of two groups: current fans and fans that lost the plot after Homogenic. That landmark 1997 album is now a decade old, which is probably enough to make anyone who loved it as much as I did feel incredibly old right about now. Already a recognized power at that stage in her career, Björk wrote all the material for Homogenic from whole cloth, as opposed to previous releases made up of songs she’d written throughout the years. As a result the album was Bjork’s more cohesive and unified statement to date, a glorious fusion of electronic beats and orchestral arrangements that still sounds vital today.

The fusion was an idea Bjork had been working towards for years; a mix-it-yourself disc with Mark Bell’s electronic wizardry dominating one stereo channel and the Kronos Quartet playing alone on the other never came to fruition, but the Homogenic tour featured that exact lineup on stage. By the time Dancer in the Dark and the associated soundtrack Selmasongs rolled around in 2000, however, it seemed that Björk had become a bit comfortable with the sound she’d created; though found sounds largely replaced the electronic flourishes on Selmasongs, Björk was still dealing with essentially the same basic formula. The very next year, she threw the whole thing out and produced Vespertine, an immaculately produced album that nevertheless polarized her fan base. While a critical and sales success, Vespertine also put a lot of people off, myself included, because of its wilful obscurity and frustrating lack of dynamics. The $50 I spent on a ticket to her Toronto stop were the last dollars she got from me.

I’d all but given up on Björk after that; 2004’s Medulla didn’t strike me as much better than Vespertine and her public persona grew ever more bizarre and strange—not that she wasn’t already bizarre and strange, but collaborations with Matthew Barney and tours in opera houses seemed to aim for an entirely different level of pretension than I was willing to accomodate. So if you’re like me, you’ve tuned out most of the news about Volta. If “Earth Intruders” is any indication, however, it might be time to start listening again. Backed by production courtesy of Timbaland, an apparent desire to write actual songs again, and a new obsession with the power of dance, Volta may just be the thing to bring estranged fans back into the fold.