By her own admission, Twigs is pretty “plugged out” when it comes to keeping tabs on music on the internet, including her own. At the XL office, surrounded by tables full of publicists and account managers combing American music blogs for the day’s news, she looks a bit sadly at the dozen cupcakes she has delivered, about half of which have yet to be consumed. She takes me over to a large Mac desktop computer and has one of the label people play me her new video with inc. It’s shot in lush black-and-white at their California desert home and casts Twigs and inc.’s two brothers, Andrew and Daniel Aged, in a surreal narrative she says was inspired by the incestuous sibling relationship in Bertolucci’s 2003 film, The Dreamers. Later, when we’re walking away from the office, she asks, “What did you make of the story? Could you get a sense of our respective contributions to the song?” I fumble around for something insightful to say, and mention how it’s interesting that inc. started as session musicians. “I think that describing them that way is pretty reductive,” she says, bristling slightly for the first time since we met. “That’s like talking about me and saying that I’m just a singer.”

Growing up in Gloucestershire, Twigs says that even her earliest forays into music and dance involved careful consideration of all aspects of a given artistic spectacle. At 11, for instance, she signed up for a choreography competition and shocked the audience with a full-concept routine about the life of a slave, set to Marvin Gaye’s “Calypso Blues.” “I made my mum make me a costume, and it had to be to a certain piece of music, and I had to imagine shackles on my hands, and the shackles had to be heavy, so all the movements were like, low to the floor,” she remembers. “It was just the weirdest idea, but that was the idea, and I had to carry it through.” Twigs’ mother, a clothing designer and seamstress by vocation, continued making costumes for her even after college. While Twigs wrote songs in her free time, she kept dancing, landing backup spots in music videos and even touring with some big-time pop stars (“I won’t go into names—I’m sure people will find me in YouTube clips and stuff like that”). Still, she struggled to piece together a living.

For a couple years, Twigs worked various late-late shifts on London’s cabaret circuit, often incarnating a character she describes as a cross between Jessica Rabbit and Betty Boop and singing and dancing her way through a routine that revolved around Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You.” Twigs’ years on the city’s burlesque circuit, she says, provided her with crucial professional experience in crafting a performance from the bottom up—from costumes to music, dance moves and lighting—but more importantly, they afforded her an opportunity to experiment with being someone she was not.

Onstage in red lipstick and a long, backless blue dress, her hair parted to the side like a ’40s pin-up girl, she’d conclude most performances by walking up to an attractive-looking couple in the audience, singing the last words of the song to the man as though she were “going to devour him,” then, just as the sexual tension became too intense for comfort, turning to the woman and kneeling down to kiss her hand. “Just like, playing with people,” she remembers. “My cabaret character was someone much harder than I am, someone that could go and steal someone’s glass of wine and chuck it on them in rage, or someone that could climb over a table, or someone that could just be really daring in a way that no one ever got angry at her—I guess the side of womanhood that you would have always wanted to explore but rarely got the chance to.” Interacting with Twigs, it’s hard to imagine this unblushing seductress emerging from the same soft-spoken young woman who shyly offers me cupcakes and tea. When she starts addressing me in text messages with the pet name “Naughty Emilie,” though, it’s startling, like I’m witnessing flickers of the performer in her that likes to catch other people off-guard.