The Song That Helps Explain FKA Twigs

In today’s edition, a favorite FKA Twigs song. Plus:

FKA Twigs’s “Two Weeks,” from the 2014 album “LP1,” set the stage for her signature luxe, experimental style: a layered blend of electronica, R. & B., and pop that roils with desire. Since then, she’s solidified a place among the critically lauded avant-garde—Björk, Laurie Anderson, Rosaliá—with four studio albums, each marking evolution in her alien aesthetics and exploration of womanhood. With the acclaim came the spotlight; tabloids obsessed over her string of high-profile relationships, personal traumas, and health issues. Her latest album, “Eusexua”—her first on a major label—was created, she told me, to move outside of herself. The neologism is a portmanteau of “euphoria” and “sex,” meant to mirror the “egoless presence” experienced when “you’re kissing a stranger, or you’re just about to have an orgasm, or you’re just on the precipice of a brilliant idea,” she explained. Or, as in the case of Twigs, when you’re having an epiphany in the bathroom of a rave in Prague.

I spoke with Twigs, for this story, under calmer circumstances: over a brief visit at a serene teahouse; in a car on the L.A. freeway; and amid holiday lights at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont. She recounted her nights spent dancing through Berlin, London, and Ibiza. The resulting album is a stunning, glitchy, nineties-club inspired record. The process of creating it was therapeutic for Twigs, transforming “Eusexua” into a philosophical movement: a rejection of self-obsession in favor of intentionally embracing the present. Read or listen to the story »

P.S. The Beatles launched the British Invasion in the U.S. on this day in 1964. Only a few weeks before, our reporter Thomas Whiteside interviewed their twenty-nine-year-old manager, Brian Epstein. “I think that America is ready for the Beatles,” Epstein told Whiteside. “When they come, they will hit this country for six.” 🪲

Hannah Jocelyn contributed to today’s edition.