FKA twigs

MAGDALENE

Young Turks

In music, there is the familiar, the alien and an in-between space that would be vacant, if not for the existence of FKA twigs. Since the British artist started making music, panting messages of infatuation over spectral R&B beats on 2012’s EP1, the dancer, singer, producer and performance artist has constantly swerved easy definition.

She is, after all, a polymath: the kind of artist who would sooner spin all of her plates than exclude part of her persona from her work. That sentiment has trickled through her catalogue to date. Both her breathless debut LP1 and the crushing, maximalist gem that followed it, the M3LL155X EP, capture an artist whose attitude towards creating abstract work, while remaining firmly in touch with reality, is tightly intertwined. Her humanism is as potent as her desire to make something different.

Toeing that line and maintaining control has played a key part in helping twigs grow greater than her contemporaries. Her music is scarce but precise, every violent and unearthly beat considered. But sometimes, it’s best to stretch out and feel everything, and let pain shape you in ways it hasn’t before. Enter twigs’ cataclysmic, melancholic masterpiece MAGDALENE.

In 2019, FKA twigs crept out of the shadows whispering seven syllables of self-flagellation. On cellophane – a new era’s glistening strings and glum keys replacing the thundering, carnal synth-hop that had shaped her prior work – she repeated a lyric that crystallised the influence of her sophomore record: “Didn’t I do it for you?”

MAGDALENE is a mountain built from the remnants of twigs’ tumultuous past half decade. In that time period, there were relationships that have been dissected by tabloids. Then came a medical diagnosis: a “fruit bowl” of fibroid tumours that put her body through hell. For the first time in her life, she was halted.

And so, twigs made a record that mulled over that pain. MAGDALENE wallows in its sore heart; what it feels like to be betrayed by your own body and let down by those you love.

The opening few songs feel like the first dizzying hit of confusion when a lover leaves you. Hymnal opener thousand eyes and the melancholy of home with you precede sad day. It’s the record’s strongest meeting of emotional lyricism and skewed pop production. The simmering, shaky piano chords and twigs’ perfect enunciation at the start making way for a song that is soaring then, all of a sudden, sad and apocalyptic.

The production that wallpapers twigs’ work – predominantly from Arca, Clams Casino, Dev Hynes – has long been one of the most alluring components of it, perhaps even more so than her lyrics. When it comes to those words, she is direct and unambiguous in a way that balances out the proudly cacophonic instrumental. But on MAGDALENE she takes the reins. twigs’ role as a producer focuses less on polished precision and more on capturing emotion in its most aggressive, narcotising form here. Her part in it is so prominent that Nicolas Jaar – the most present force on the record beside herself – suggested removing his name from the credits entirely.

MAGDALENE’s core is angered and chaotic. Bulgarian folk choirs battle trap snares on holy terrain, a song that’s been described by some as pandering to the streaming ecosystem, yet still contains 200 coexisting elements. Above the guttural army cries and tingling percussion of fallen alien, twigs delivers the majority of her lines in a piercing falsetto. “In the blazing sun, I saw you/ In the shadows hiding from yourself,” she growls as strobing synths, white noise and melancholic piano chords merge.

twigs has always understood and battled with subservience. In her hands, the desire she gives and receives is dangerous, incendiary and a great source of power. On LP1’s Two Weeks, she insistently told a lover “get your mouth open, you know you’re mine“, before becoming “your sweet little love maker” on Pendulum. M3LL155X contrasts commandeering behaviour (“Now hold that pose for me”) with an offering of herself (“Wind me up/ I’m your doll”). Here, in a sea of songwriting that ponders her emotional state far more bravely and deeper than she has before, that ability to coerce those around her still seeps through.

Who are we when the person we love leaves us? What do we become when the body we trust turns against us? Over 39 immaculate minutes, MAGDALENE articulates those feelings in a way that feels, like all of her work, familiar and yet alien. Through grand expressions of weakness, fury and conflict that constantly collide with each other, she has created a blistering soundscape of biblical scale. MAGDALENE is FKA twigs’ very first masterpiece.

Douglas Greenwood