From heartbreak to wholeness: That is the narrative around Björk’s forthcoming, as-yet-untitled album. Where Vulnicura concerned the very public dissolution of her 13-year-relationship with the artist Matthew Barney, she has said that “this new album is about a love that’s even greater. [I]t’s about rediscovering love—but in a spiritual way, for lack of a better word.” “The Gate,” the first song to be revealed from the new album, makes that theme explicit. It belongs to the tradition of her quietest songs and most dulcet ballads, and it is as direct as anything she has sung.

The theme of oneness goes to the very heart of the song’s construction. In the soft, classically inspired introduction, her multi-tracked vocal harmonies twine with acoustic strings and woodwinds until the elements seem practically inseparable. Her collaborator Arca’s electronic fingerprints are legible in a lowing, pitched-down vocal sample and a flourish of harp-like synthesizers, but the natural world exerts an even more powerful pull: There is a diving vocal sample that might be mistaken for a whale song, and in the quietest passages, hushed noises suggest the rustling of the forest or the clicking of stones as they roll across the seafloor. The song’s ebb and flow is almost tidal; silence comprises the dark matter that holds it all together.

The lyrics concern the process of being made whole after a heartbreak: “My healed chest wound/Transformed into a gate,” she sings early in the song. Later, she taps into her longstanding fascination with scientific processes, imagining herself as a beam of light split apart, which only her lover can bring back together. Toward the song’s end, she reveals herself in the plainest of terms—“Didn’t used to be so needy/Just more broken than normal”—and then in terms that are markedly less plain: “My silhouette is oval/It is a gate.” Björk has never shied away from bold metaphors, and here, with her egg-shaped portal into love’s domain, she aims bigger than ever. Whatever comes next, this snapshot of love’s gestation feels nothing short of magical.