FKA twigs mounts a dancer on all fours and rides him throughout the stage. “It feels good,” the artist born Tahliah Barnett coos in her breathy, pixie voice. A gaggle of pulsating performers encompass her, two-stepping to the glitchy techno beat of “Room of Fools”. The track seems on her club-inspired third album Eusexua, a time period the 37-year-old coined to explain an enlightened state of readability and freedom, just like the “second earlier than an orgasm”.
“Eusexua” may not have had the identical impression as Charli XCX’s “Brat”, however Eusexua the album – Twigs’s first to succeed in the Prime 10 within the UK – marks the pop star’s wildly profitable pivot to membership music. It follows a knockout promotional marketing campaign that has seen her trapped in cages inside east-London warehouse raves, dancing in Severance-style places of work and posting soliloquies from her bathtub. She sounds proper at house on the album, planting her experimental flag right into a nightclub’s sticky dance ground. One big leap.
Tonight, then, is twigs’s victory dance. At Journal London within the industrial Greenwich Peninsula, vibrant textual content flashes on a display screen to introduce Act I: The Follow. Already, it’s as if we’ve been transported to Berlin to observe the final ones standing at a techno nightclub (the kind the place telephones are banned and it’s socially unacceptable to reach earlier than 1am). twigs angrily rips off her beige maxi gown to disclose her nude underwear to the metallic thumps of “Striptease”. “I’m borderline, it’s getting late, I really feel alive,” she sings.
Act II: State of Being sees twigs – a classically skilled dancer – suspended upside-down in a series swing because the album’s title observe performs. Our Eusexua bubble is briefly popped for a mashup of the turbocharged observe “Honda” (that includes Pa Salieu) and the party-ready dancehall track “Papi Bones” (with Shygirl), each from 2022’s Caprisongs. The rave continues in a Madonna-inspired phase, as dancers carry out an electrifying catwalk routine to Madge’s 1990 hit “Vogue”. twigs seems in a black shimmering cowboy hat, do-si-doing to the “Ray of Gentle”-hued “Woman Feels Good”. The gang sings alongside to the sound of warbling, trance-inflected synths: “When a lady feels good, it makes the world go ‘spherical.”
Twigs’s star energy is unmistakable, and each side of her extraterrestrial artistry is on show tonight. Throughout the two-hour set, she pirouettes round a pole in metallic pleasers to “24hr Canine”, delivers a Kill Invoice-style combat scene for “Numbers” and executes intricate carry work on the flick of a swap. You’re loath to look away, however visibility is maybe the one subject right here: advanced choreography is steadily missed as a result of shortness of the stage in such an enormous industrial venue.
That is not sufficient to cease the celebration, although, and twigs actually isn’t achieved but. She closes the evening with an emotional acoustic rendition of “Cellophane”, a melancholy evaluation of a crumbling relationship, from her 2019 album Magdalene. “Why received’t you do it for me? / When all I do is for you,” she calls for, tearing up as she stands inside a gargantuan dice, her hair styled into spikes and her black PVC gown doubling as a tent. She nervously breathes down the microphone then stops. In some way, she’s commanded this rave into silence.
