What comes after heartbreak? For Björk, it’s “a love letter to enthusiasm and optimism,” she said.

Björk’s darkly formidable 2015 album, “Vulnicura,” reflected the breakup of her decade-long relationship with the artist Matthew Barney in songs of nearly paralyzing pain and simmering anger, weighted with dissonant, dramatic strings.

But her new album, “Utopia,” prizes airiness: the breath that powers voices and flutes; the atmosphere where birds fly; structures and tempos that change freely rather than being locked to a beat. The album, due on Nov. 24, is the latest iteration of Björk’s career-long fascination with how nature and technology can interact.

In an interview at her apartment in Brooklyn, she said “Utopia” had long been her working title for the album. While making it, she read extensively about utopias: in academic studies and in stories and novels through the centuries, from ancient fables to the science fiction of Octavia E. Butler. “Utopia has gone from everything being monasteries, to feminist islands, to socialism, to ‘Peach Blossom Spring,’” she said, referring to a tale of an isolated, idyllic community that was written in the fifth century in China.

The 2016 election of Donald J. Trump only strengthened her determination to envision hope. “If optimism ever was like an emergency, it’s now,” she said. “Instead of moaning and becoming really angry, we need to actually come up with suggestions of what the world we want to live in, in the future, could be. This album is supposed to be like an idea, a suggestion, a proposal of the world we could live in.”