FKA Twigs Leaves It All on the Dance Floor

Twigs’s own kitchen, she informed me, has a shelf of teas as long as the S.U.V. we were riding in: jasmine and rose “for beauty,” lemon balm, lavender, and chamomile to wind down at night. Home is in Hackney, a few hours’ drive from the town where she was raised, in the West Midlands. Born Tahliah Barnett to a British mother with Spanish roots and a Jamaican Egyptian father, she characterizes her upbringing as working class. Amid family financial struggles, she earned a scholarship to a private school celebrated for its voice and dance programs. (Her nickname, Twigs, came from some classmates, who’d noticed how her joints clicked while she danced; FKA was added after a legal dispute with a band of the same name.) She was the only mixed-race student in her year and a self-described “weird, artsy kid” who would choose rehearsing over playing with friends. “I know everyone just thought I was a freak,” she said.

The writing for “Eusexua” ’s most surprising track, “Childlike Things”—a delightful schoolyard romp that includes North West rapping in Japanese about God—began when Twigs herself was thirteen years old. Inspired by the classic Maurice Sendak picture book “Where the Wild Things Are,” she’d fantasized about a future where she could be an artist, travelling the world and landing where the “beautiful things” were. She finished the song at nineteen, yearning to escape her “mundane life” and express her “magic powers.” When she returned to it for “Eusexua,” she wanted to feature someone with youthful energy who might respond to its dreamlike themes. “I was, like, I know an ambitious eleven-year-old!” she said, laughing. She messaged North’s mom, Kim Kardashian, with whom she’d established a rapport during lockdown, and a mutual friend contacted North’s dad, Kanye (a onetime collaborator of Twigs’s), both of whom agreed.

In her late teens, Twigs juggled odd jobs—working as a shot girl at Tiger Tiger, performing at cabaret clubs across London. “I’d get, like, thirty quid for doing some weird performance,” she recalled. Every now and then she’d score a gig as a backup dancer, appearing in music videos for Ed Sheeran and Jessie J. But her big break came at a bondage party, where she met an A. & R. rep from Young (formerly Young Turks,) then an imprint under the influential label XL Recordings. In 2012, at twenty-four, she released “EP1,” a brooding, atmospheric project recorded in just four days. The studio album “LP1,” with its cinematic music videos, cemented her status as a rising star. Every release that followed would be praised for its evolution, which paralleled Twigs’s own: the EP “M3LL155X” ’s feminist exploration of what she calls her “personal female energy”; “Magdalene” ’s unearthing of pain and heartache; and, most recently, the mix tape “Caprisongs” ’s freewheeling collage of friendship and ambition.

“Eusexua” feels like a lifetime in a bottle—layered, surprising, and packed with references to her previous work. It’s a dismantling and rearranging of dance-music history, blending snippets of drum-’n’-bass, trip-hop, techno, trance, club, and industrial sounds into starry-eyed ballads of contentment and sexy anthems about serving cunt. A Madonna fan will hear “Ray of Light” and “Music”-era stylings in the album highlight “Girl Feels Good,” a song that asks men to simply listen to women in order to understand them. There are subtle nods to nineties innovators: the breakbeat group Olive, the electronic pioneer Aphex Twin, d.j.s-producers the Basement Boys, and, of course, Björk. As is often the case with Twigs, her voice—flowing between an airy falsetto and soulful depths—is the through line, taking vulnerability and calcifying it into something fiercer and stranger.

The G.P.S. on Hemingway’s phone took us to the Hollywood haunt Chateau Marmont, where Twigs settled in a plush booth and we happily placed a less ascetic order: a Cabernet Sauvignon and truffle fries for her, a dirty Martini for me. Talk turned to the attention economy and the dangers of being too plugged into what she describes as the “web of lies” of politics, reality television, and “the interpersonal relationships of thousands of strangers.” As if on cue, her phone battery died. She didn’t bother to look for a charger until she realized she’d have to text Hemingway—who was reading in the car—for a ride home.

These days, it seemed, Twigs was less interested in outside validation. She’s become increasingly guarded with the press in the course of her career—likely a response to years of relentless, often bruising scrutiny. During her relationship with Robert Pattinson, “Twilight” fans inundated her social media with racist abuse and death threats. The tabloids’ obsession with her only grew after their breakup, tracking her every move through the LaBeouf saga and, years later, as she was dating Matty Healy, the lead singer of the 1975. In the time she’s been working on “Eusexua,” she’s also been waiting for her lawsuit against LaBeouf to go to trial, after multiple delays.

One of the record’s quieter interludes, “Sticky,” is a survey of hurdles public and private. She sings:

I’m tired of messing up my life with overcomplicated moments

and sticky situations

You’re right, I hold it in my body

little snakes inside a bottle writhing in my frustration

Twigs told me that she’s now less inclined to trust people straightaway, even as she’s working to forge new connections. She said, “I’ve been deeply getting back into community after being so scared of people after 2018”—the year her relationship with LaBeouf began. “The amount of rotters I’ve been around is so unlucky.” That period had been “so bad and so dark,” she told me, that she had resolved to “take it on the chin” rather than discuss it further: “There’s no story I could even tell. There’s no journalist that I would even bother burdening with how bad it got.” Later, when I asked about the trial, she was careful, saying she was more interested in helping other survivors than in rehashing her experience for “clickbait.” She’s been concentrating on what she can control—surrounding herself with people she trusts and working as an ambassador for the Hackney-based nonprofit organization Sistah Space, which provides support, housing, and resources to Black women who have been victims of abuse.

Reflecting on the modern tendency toward self-obsession, she commented that she’s now more interested in “the other.” Then the Sartre turned to Durkheim. “We are a collective consciousness, and we’re prevented from being that way. We’re literally set against each other. We’re set into different groups and not working together. I mean, I don’t think our brains are working!” she exclaimed. As we talked, she showed me a movement she called “looping,” extending her arms in front of her in a ring, then circling them as if churning a gigantic vat of butter. (I mirrored the motion, which was, indeed, soothing.) “You just basically realize that you have everything inside you to be lighter,” she said. Twigs and I are about the same age, but when I remarked that getting older had come with a greater sense of responsibility, she expressed surprise. “I feel like a baby,” she told me. “Like I’m just starting to figure it out.” After years spent managing the emotions of others, she was finally able to let go. “I feel like my only responsibility right now is to look after myself.”