Published online by TN2 magazine 17 December 2019.
It’s been five years since FKA twigs last released a full length album, the highly acclaimed LP1. This debut album had a fantastic sense of atmosphere, with a minimalist, glitchy electronic aesthetic that complemented twigs’ fragile vocal lines wonderfully. Twigs’ voice would break through muffled beats, intimate and tragic. The consistent sparseness of the sound gave it a haunting, lonely power.
In this follow up record, although there is only one track featuring another artist, twigs feels a lot less lonely. You could see Magdalene as coming in the wake of those other heavily produced, highly collaborative and promoted albums like Tyler the Creator’s IGOR and Ariana Grande’s Thank U, Next. Their similarities also lie in their personal context, with each album being in reaction to a breakup. “I never thought heartbreak could be so all-encompassing,” twigs said of the album, “but the process of making this album has allowed me for the first time, and in the most real way, to find compassion when I have been at my most ungraceful, confused and fractured. I stopped judging myself and at that moment found hope in Magdalene.” It as if for these artists, the isolation and fragmentation that are felt following a break-up are embraced and become features of their music.
The liner notes of Magdalene are far from lonely. Nineteen people were involved in writing the songs and thirteen people in their production. Unlike IGOR, the dizzying number of collaborators isn’t reigned in by a clear structure. The final result is that the album lacks tonal consistency. The most egregious offender is the song “holy terrain”. The sudden appearance of a soundcloud beat and a middling rap feature is like a bucket of cold water after the dreamy atmosphere of the previous tracks. Fortunately, the transitions are generally quite smooth on this album. We follow twigs’ vocals as she moves through a shifting musical landscape, from the Kate Bush-esque “sad day” with its ‘80s synths to the otherworldly “fallen alien”, where a crooning chorus reminiscent of Thom Yorke is contrasted with chanted verses so aggressive that they wouldn’t be out of place on an M.I.A. track.
Magdalene’s runtime is another similarity to IGOR and Thank U, Next. At just under forty minutes, the album feels insubstantial. It never explores, only evokes. Although the closing track is fantastic, it left me with a feeling of “is that it?” Might it be that the music itself has been neglected in favour of the wider conceptual project of Magdalene?
It’s great to have a new album from FKA twigs after five years, and it’s exciting to see her collaborating with other artists, but with the end of the year approaching, I’m left wondering if I’ll still be listening to Magdalene in 2020.
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