FKA TWIGS

Despite her ethereal aesthetic, inscrutable public persona and cerebral body of work that blends R&B and art-pop, the singer has charted a singular course for herself — and for the future of music — by doing something surprisingly earthbound: embracing the role of the perpetual student.

-  Emily J. Lordi

Didn’t I do it for you?” the Black British artist FKA Twigs sings at the start of “Cellophane,” her voice bowing low over a spare piano interval. “Why don’t I do it for you?” Another piano sounds as if from underwater, and soft beat-boxing keeps the tempo like brushes on a drum. “Why won’t you do it for me, when all I do is for you?” The song, the lead single from Twigs’s 2019 album, “Magdalene,” is a quiet, searching response to rejection coloured by disbelief: What begins as a relationship autopsy (“Didn’t I?”) turns subtly from past tense to present (“Why not?”). Twigs was crying when she recorded the song, which she did in the wake of her heavily publicised breakup with the British actor Robert Pattinson. (“All wrapped in cellophane, the feelings that we had,” she sings, an ostensible nod to the way the couple’s experience was packaged for tabloid consumption.) Still, the recording was so abject, and in that way so different from her typical highconcept art-pop, that she had to laugh at herself. Envisioning the video, her first thought, she tells me, was: “I should just be a sad stripper.”