At Manchester’s sold-out Aviva Studios, smoke curls around a giant, ominous black box that resembles a freshly landed spaceship. It’s the perfect warm-up act for Cheltenham-born experimentalist FKA twigs, whose abstract take on pop has always felt inscrutably alien: from 2012’s dark, trip-hoppy debut EP1 to her new club-inspired album Eusexua, her first to hit the UK Top 10. If the latter’s title proved slippery – it’s a term she coined for the elevated state of clarity she likened to “the moment before an orgasm” – this three-act show is even trickier to pin down, and irresistibly so.
A title card on a screen introduces Act I: The Practice. Twigs slowly emerges from behind the box in a dress, singing a medley that threads backwards through her catalogue: from Thousand Eyes on 2019’s Magdalene to Weak Spot from EP1. Then she snaps to the present, namely the club vibe of Eusexua. Her dancers strip to their underwear and dance to the airy techno of Room of Fools. It’s a striking showcase of FKA twigs’s versatility, held together by her acrobatic live vocal and closing in the drum’n’bass outro of Striptease.
In Act II: State of Being, the box is uncovered to reveal an open frame and the show becomes more free-form and spectacle-heavy. Suspending herself from chains in the box, she sings Eusexua’s title-track upside down. Girl Feels Good features a whip-cracking dancer. Darting around her catalogue, she throws in an unreleased song called Perfectly – a bright, punchy, club-ready track in the vein of Eusexua – and dances to a remix of Madonna’s Vogue. Act III: The Pinnacle feels more sedate, but no less surprise-filled: FKA twigs dances with a sword, sings to a huge silver dragon operated by puppeteers and closes with a pole dance in the box to 24hr Dog.
There’s a nagging sense that this three-part structure doesn’t really go anywhere concrete: the resulting jumble falls slightly short of the high concepts it gestures at, though it works as sheer pop spectacle. It even hints, thrillingly, at a future wherein FKA twigs, like Charli xcx, might become a bona fide pop star well into her career’s third act.
• FKA twigs is playing at Magazine London on 21 and 22 March
