Five years since her debut album, singer FKA Twigs is finally mounting her comeback, sharing album details and some of the horrors she’s faced since we last saw her.
In a cover story for UK magazine i-D, Twigs goes through a selection of songs from her upcoming second album Mary Magdalene including one called “Holy Terrain” featuring the rapper Future.
“I wasn’t sure whether he would even know who I am,” the singer says, explaining how the collaboration came to be. “I was like, ‘Hi, it’s Twigs. Let me know if you wanna talk about music or anything.’” When the rapper got back to her immediately she had a small fit of excitement. “He’s such a sweetheart. I sent him the album and I called him up and was like, ‘Listen, Future… this is what my album’s about. It’s a really empowering, sensitive record, with a lot of feminine energy, and this song is probably the most fun track on it, but I still need lyrical content.’ And he said, ‘Okay, I’ve got it’. And his verse is beautiful.”
“He’s just talking about his downfalls as a man; how he’s sorry and asking for healing,” Twigs adds. “I love sad Future. I love when he gets emo, when he expresses himself. It’s just so beautiful when he opens up.”
In expressing some of the hardships she has faced since releasing LP1, including breakups with actors Robert Pattinson and Shia LaBeouf, Twigs reveals a particularly gruesome work experience she put herself through, shooting a Spike Jonze-directed advertisement for Apple only a week into recovering from an operation where tumors were removed from her uterus.
“I looked like death, I looked disgusting. I wasn’t supposed to be moving. And Spike’s like, ‘Okay, so we’re gonna play the song and I need you to dance around your living room to it,’” explains the singer. “I was fully going for it and literally feeling like my uterus was gonna fall out. I didn’t tell them about the surgery or that I had all these stitches in my bellybutton. It was grim. It was grim as f—.”
The musician was meant to not even be walking for six weeks and here she was dancing. “When I was on set with Spike, the stitches in my bellybutton were splitting open. I told him: ‘Just so you know, if I start bleeding through this white shirt…’. I basically couldn’t lift my arms up, because all your organs stick together and you can’t stretch your stomach. I was involved in the choreography though, so I based all the movements on Audrey Hepburn as she was always moving like that – very forward and with a contracted stomach – because that’s all I could do.”
Twigs still deems the commercial “an amazing experience” though, and the advertisement both won favor both online and at many of the top advertisement awards.
FKA Twigs is set to release her album Mary Magdalene this fall. She will also appears in the upcoming film Honey Boy, written by LaBeouf.
Related content:
- The people and performers of Afropunk 2019
- Shia LaBeouf is Lucas Hedges’ conflicted dad in autobiographical Honey Boy trailer
- FKA Twigs announces M3LL155X, new EP and drops 16-minute video
