FKA twigs mounts a dancer on all fours and rides him across the stage. “It feels nice,” the artist born Tahliah Barnett coos in her breathy, pixie voice. A group of pulsating performers surround her, two-stepping to the glitchy techno beat of “Room of Fools”. The song appears on her club-inspired third album Eusexua, a term the 37-year-old coined to describe an enlightened state of clarity and freedom, like the “moment before an orgasm”.
“Eusexua” might not have had the same impact as Charli XCX’s “Brat”, but Eusexua the album – Twigs’s first to reach the Top 10 in the UK – marks the pop star’s wildly successful pivot to club music. It follows a knockout promotional campaign that has seen her trapped in cages inside east London warehouse raves, dancing in Severance-style offices and posting soliloquies from her bathtub. She sounds right at home on the album, planting her experimental flag into a nightclub’s sticky dance floor. One giant leap.
Tonight, then, is twigs’s victory dance. At Magazine London in the industrial Greenwich Peninsula, bright text flashes on a screen to introduce Act I: The Practice. Already, it’s as if we’ve been transported to Berlin to watch the last ones standing at a techno nightclub (the type where phones are banned and it’s socially unacceptable to arrive before 1am). Twigs angrily rips off her beige maxi dress to reveal her nude underwear to the metallic thumps of “Striptease”. “I’m borderline, it’s getting late, I feel alive,” she sings.
Act II: State of Being sees twigs – a classically trained dancer – suspended upside-down in a chain swing as the album’s title track plays. Our Eusexua bubble is briefly popped for a mashup of the turbocharged track “Honda” (featuring Pa Salieu) and the party-ready dancehall song “Papi Bones” (with Shygirl), both from 2022’s Caprisongs. The rave continues in a Madonna-inspired segment, as dancers perform an electrifying catwalk routine to Madge’s 1990 hit “Vogue”. Twigs appears in a black shimmering cowboy hat, do-si-doing to the “Ray of Light”-hued “Girl Feels Good”. The crowd sings along to the sound of warbling, trance-inflected synths: “When a girl feels good, it makes the world go ’round.”
Twigs’s star power is unmistakable, and every facet of her extraterrestrial artistry is on display tonight. Across the two-hour set, she pirouettes around a pole in metallic pleasers to “24hr Dog”, delivers a Kill Bill-style fight scene for “Numbers” and executes intricate lift work at the flick of a switch. You’re loath to look away, but visibility is perhaps the only issue here: complex choreography is frequently missed due to the shortness of the stage in such a huge industrial venue.
That isn’t enough to stop the party, though, and twigs certainly isn’t done yet. She closes the night with an emotional acoustic rendition of “Cellophane”, a melancholy analysis of a crumbling relationship, from her 2019 album Magdalene. “Why won’t you do it for me?/ When all I do is for you,” she demands, tearing up as she stands inside a gargantuan cube, her hair styled into spikes and her black PVC dress doubling as a tent. She nervously breathes down the microphone, then stops. Somehow, she’s commanded this rave into silence.
