At her MAGDALENE live shows earlier this year, FKA Twigs’s theatrical performance spanned dance styles from pole work to tap. But one of the most most surprising turns was the way she reimagined older songs like “Video Girl” with sharp pop-R&B choreography, delivered with an off-kilter Twigs twist.
Today’s lurking, hip-hop inspired new single “holy terrain (ft. Future)” is another taste of FKA Twigs’s second album MAGDALENE — with a video that again draws from slick choreographed styles. Flanked by dancers and wearing cropped combat trousers, she performs in a vast desolate desert landscape. The sky crackles as she moves; an electrical storm ignited every time Twigs mashes her boot into the cracked earth. But despite all the abstract imagery, it feels like the most pop-minded video she’s released to date.
Of working with Future on the single, twigs recently told i-D: “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. I love sad Future. I love when he gets emo, when he expresses himself. It’s just so beautiful when he opens up.”
Speaking of her new album MAGDALENE, which features contributions from Nicolas Jaar, Skrillex and Jack Antonoff, she also said: “No matter what you’re doing or how great your work is, sometimes it’s as though you have to be attached to a man to be validated. I’d felt like that at times. And then I started to read about Mary Magdalene and how amazing she was; how she was likely to have been Jesus’s best friend, his confidante. She was a herbalist and a healer, but, you know, her story is written out of the bible and she was ‘a prostitute’.
“I found a lot of power in the story of Mary Magdalene; a lot of dignity, a lot of grace, a lot of inspiration”
