The album peaked number one in Iceland, number three in the United Kingdom and number 32 in the United States and spawned six singles: "Army of Me", "Isobel", "It's Oh So Quiet", "Hyperballad", "Possibly Maybe", and "I Miss You". Their accompanying music videos were noted for their surrealism, themes of nature and technology, and artistic development of the medium.
Björk commenced work on the album in late 1994 at the Compass Point Studios in Nassau. The picturesque locale inspired Björk to meld the recording process with the exotic natural environment. For example, Björk waded into the ocean and recorded vocals while the sun set, captured by a digital recorder powered by a generator on the beach. The first version of "Cover Me" was recorded entirely from a cave. Björk incorporated songs she had written in Manchester with 808 State's Graham Massey before the recording of Debut. These included "Army of Me" and "The Modern Things", which she had performed live and did not need to be extensively changed. Björk said she left "Army of Me" off Debut as she felt Debut "was a more gentle energy and Post was more raw, more brutal".
Although the album was supposed to be delivered the day after she returned from the Bahamas, Björk felt it was not yet complete and continued its production in London. She enlisted a new team of engineers and programmers, and spent the next months "tweaking, rearranging, and sometimes completely rerecording her pre-existing tracks". Björk continued to compose songs such as "Isobel", which was created while she was visiting Reykjavík for Christmas, before bringing it back to Hooper's studio. The song's lyrics were written in collaboration with Icelandic poet Sjón, which was his first songwriting experience. Sjón would become a frequent collaborator throughout Björk's career. She also enlisted trip hop artist Tricky to assist in producing the album, on the condition that he would work on two tracks on her album and she would contribute two vocals for his album. Their collaboration resulted in the Post songs "Enjoy" and "Headphones"—in addition to "Keep Your Mouth Shut" and "Yoga", which appeared on Tricky's 1996 studio album, Nearly God.
The track that underwent the most extensive change was "I Miss You", an old song from the Debut era. Howie Bernstein gave the song its "Latin-tinged [rhythm]". Back in London, Björk contacted "old standby" Talvin Singh to record additional percussion parts for it. Fellow former Sugarcubes member Einar Örn Benediktsson was also contacted to play the trumpet on "Enjoy". English sessionist Gary Barnacle was enlisted to play the saxophone. Although he had not been involved in music for a long time, Brazilian composer Eumir Deodato immediately agreed to participate on the album at Björk's request. Björk decided to contact him after being impressed by his arrangements of a rare Milton Nascimento song called "Travessia". Deodato's presence as composer and conductor "immediately bolstered" "Hyperballad", "You've Been Flirting Again" and "Isobel". This addition of strings, brass and percussion elements gave Post the balance Björk felt her original recordings had lacked. "It's Oh So Quiet" was the last track to be recorded. By the time the album was finished in April 1995, the list of co-producers included Björk, Hooper, Bernstein, Massey, and Tricky.
Post showed a bit of a bolder side of Björk, who now had ventured all the way from Iceland to England, and was exploring the faster pace and big city life that this new country brought. This album became influenced of that and became more adventurous and club-friendly as a contrast to the shy first album, Debut. Post tapped into the vortex of multicultural energy that was mid-90s London where she had relocated, and where strange hybrids such as jungle and trip-hop were bubbling". Björk described Post as "musically promiscuous" and "spastic".
The album touches on various musical styles, including industrial music, big-band jazz, trip hop, chillout, and experimental music. The album is considered Post to be a "connecting point between industrial-disco, ambient-trance, and catchy synth pop". The balance between synthetic and organic elements in the album—generated through the combination of electronic and "real" instruments—is a recurring characteristic of Björk's output.
The album opens with "Army of Me", an aggressive song with industrial rock, and trip hop influences. It incorporates a looped drum sample of Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks". Dedicated to Björk's younger brother, the song's lyrics are, according to Björk herself, "about telling someone who is full of self-pity and doesn't have anything together to get a life and stand up". "Hyperballad", which incorporates a spectrum of electronic and orchestral styles, has been described as "a love song penned by Aphex Twin". The track is followed by "The Modern Things", a song that, in a magical realist tone, "playfully posits the theory that technology has always existed, waiting in mountains for humans to catch up". "It's Oh So Quiet" covers a German composition made famous by Betty Hutton. It has been described as "a palate-cleanser during the course of the record".[
The following track, "Enjoy", a song concerning the links between sex and fear, has been considered "decidedly trippy", and "Post's most abrasive track", like the previous track "Enjoy", features "mysterious or open-ended lyrics". "Isobel" is a string-laden, orchestral trip hop song, conceived by Björk as "part autobiography part storytelling", its lyrics concern Isobel, a woman magically born in a forest who finds people in the city "a bit too clever for her", eventually retreating back to nature and sending them a message of instinct through trained moths. Inspired by South American literature—particularly Gabriel García Márquez—the track's lyrics discuss "the duality between reason and emotions, between intuition and intellect"; in Björk's words, "asking how 20th century civilisation clashes with nature and, in places like Iceland and Thailand, people really believe they can have a TV remote control in one hand and a ghost sitting beside them".
"Possibly Maybe" is an ambient dub track that fuses trip-hop and chill-out music. Its lyrics document the various stages of Björk's ill-fated relationship with Stéphane Sednaoui. With the track, De Vries "create[d] a vinyl-crackling ambience, full of glissando strings and leaden, muted bass. "I Miss You" was described in 1997 as an "amalgam of styles, with electronic drums melding into African bongos mixed with jazzy horn playing". A house music number, its "horn-infused Afro-Cuban strains [...] reflect the romantic whimsy of [its] lyrics". Björk wrote "Cover Me", one of the quieter moments on the album, to her co-producer Nellee Hooper after he agreed to participate in the making of Post. She has said: "I guess I was trying to make fun of myself, how dangerous I manage sometimes to make album making. And trying to lure him into it. But it is also a admiration thing from me to him". The album ends with the experimental "Headphones", an ambient track.
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