FKA twigs has never been more famous, but she’s taking it in stride: “I think that being famous is funny,” she announces on her new song “Wild and Alone.” For an artist who has reopened her wounds on heart-pummelling songs like “cellophane,” this is a rather breezy approach to fame. Over vocal samples typical of Jersey club— suspended as if in zero gravity, ghostly and uncanny—she recruits pop’s foremost comedian, PinkPantheress, for a more light-hearted take on the themes she’s often explored throughout her career, of crafting selfhood and warding off loneliness amid the clamor of fame.
But this year’s rise was not without its minor controversies. After the release of February’s stellar, now Grammy-nominated EUSEXUA, there was her rescheduled North American tour due to her production team not obtaining the correct visa. Then, twigs faced further consternation for a defensive statement she posted on Discord, decrying the “parasocial nightmare” of her fandom’s response to the postponed shows. Then, in April, a snippet of her live keynote conversation for Resident Advisor went viral, in which she asked: “Where are the thinkers?” Her impromptu question wasn’t the most well thought-out one (as many online pointed out, the thinkers are broke and tired!), but the proliferation of bad-faith takes it spawned did go some way to proving her point.
It was in the midst of all this chaos that we got her most chaotic album rollout ever. The deluxe edition of EUSEXUA morphed into a full second album named Afterglow, which was announced onstage at Lowlands festival in August. Three months later, on the day of Afterglow’s release, twigs simultaneously shared a new, updated version of the original record (both are available on streaming services, confusingly, under the name EUSEXUA—the new one with an altered cover that distorts twigs’ eyes and ears). The updated version of EUSEXUA not only contains four new songs—and a remix of the spiky ballad “Striptease” with added Eartheater—but removes original songs, and peppers the new ones throughout the tracklist. It’s not quite a deluxe album, or a remix album, but a sort of reimagined shadow version of the original record.
