Songfacts®:

• An outtake from Björk's 2017 album Utopia, the Icelandic singer felt that the Afrobeats-influenced song fits on Fossora because of its percussive weight.
• Bjork came up with the hopeful lyrics while hiking in the Caribbean. "It's almost like yoga, sort of meditational - just me talking to myself to be in the moment," she told The Atlantic.
• The song is a duet with Norwegian jazz-EDM singer-songwriter Emilie Nicolas. Picking up on the lyrics about growth, Nicholas sang a verse inspired by her own pregnancy and the baby that was growing within her. "Emilie is obviously a really big feature of my home disco," Bjork told Uncut magazine. "After we have danced the last mental head banging session, before we go back to bed, we have a little bit of Emilie. She's our Norwegian sugar. Her voice is just ridiculous. She doesn't have a voice that shouts at you. It's really internal. She's a singer's singer. When you listen to her voice on headphones, there's so much going on inside the tone."
• Nicolas was stunned to have the opportunity to sing with her idol. "I got an e-mail inviting me to meet up after her show in Oslo, and I cried for a week," she recalled to Uncut. "It was so surreal."
  
  "When she asked me to sing, I just thought, 'I don't want to sound like her. I'm going to make my own thing at the end,' so that's what I did." Nicolas continued. "It was really like it's the hardest thing I've ever done. Understanding what she means and understanding the music, it's really hard to do when you're not in the same room. When she sent the completed song back, with the two of us singing together, it was just too much. I thought, that's it, I can die tomorrow. I'm good. I've done it all."
• Bjork produced the song and did the flute arrangement. With multiple scores by 12 flutists edited together, "Allow" features "basically 60 flutes doing rhythmical patterns," she said.