In a cold, oak-panelled boardroom at Sotheby’s auction house in deep Mayfair, FKA twigs looks out of place. She’s clad in her uniform of a “worn-out, Japanese-blue” dancer’s bodysuit and a wraparound, matching, knee-length zip-up hoodie; it’s the colour she’s been living in for the past few months because it “says nothing” but “always looks good”.
The 36-year-old singer is softly spoken, diminutive at 5ft 7in, and looks utterly otherworldly: her makeup-free skin glows and her head is shaved except for a ponytail with braids at the back, an ancient Egyptian style she adopted after her father (a musician she didn’t meet until she was 18) told her she was “part Egyptian”. She’s quick to remind me: “I grew up in Gloucestershire” and “live a simple life in east London with my partner”.
We’re speaking because twigs (real name Tahliah Debrett Barnett) has returned to the music industry after a traumatic four years, released the first track and video from her new album Eusexua , and performed a two-week dance performance, The Eleven , which is currently unfolding — in all its growling, unchoreographed glory — in a gallery space next door. “The last few years have been a huge healing journey for me. I’ve really had to learn how to use my body again and live in it,” she says.
In 2020, she filed a civil lawsuit in Los Angeles accusing her ex-boyfriend of nine months, Transformers actor Shia LaBeouf, of “relentless abuse,” including sexual assault, battery and infliction of emotional distress. The lawsuit is set for next month, on October 14. In the filing, she alleges that LaBeouf threw her against a car, woke her up by choking her, endangered her life by threatening to crash a car they were in, and knowingly gave her a sexually transmitted disease. LaBeouf denies all of the allegations and has said he did not harm the singer.
“It’s funny because healing is a bit of a dirty word, I think, especially for the British. It kind of puts us down,” twigs says. “But I think it’s a beautiful thing in the sense that I believe we’re always healing and it doesn’t stop. I’ve changed a lot in the last five years. I’m really comfortable with the people around me now.” She has been with American photographer and director Jordan Hemingway since 2022, following other long-term, high-profile relationships with The 1975’s Matty Healy, from 2020 to 2022, and Robert Pattinson, from 2014 to 2017.
Regardless of her personal life, twigs is a musical powerhouse and one of London’s biggest exports, with 2.7 million monthly Spotify listeners. She grew up in Cheltenham with her salsa dancer and teacher mother, and attended St Edward’s School on a scholarship before moving to The Brits School and later Croydon College, where she earned her stripes as a backing dancer.
Her debut album, LP1, came out a decade ago, and her celebration of the queer and voguing community catapulted her into the mainstream. In 2019, she released Magdalene, which found her “really diving into her femininity.” The video for the track, Cellophane, featured her pole dancing, shocking some. She embraced the conversation, speaking out about sex work, her own experiences as a hostess, and in 2020 set up a £30,000 GoFundMe to raise money for strippers and sex workers hit hard by the pandemic.
Don’t mistake her album hiatus (she’ll release her debut mixtape Caprisongs in 2022) for an embarrassment of putting herself in the spotlight. She went viral in January after condemning the Advertising Standards Authority’s decision to ban a Calvin Klein ad that featured her naked and presented her as a “stereotypical sexual object.”
“People have always been quite outraged by women of colour promoting strong, amazing bodies,” she says today. In March, the ASA partially reversed the ban. “I have thick skin on this, but I think it’s sad that my sisters Eartha Kitt, Grace Jones and Josephine Baker did the same thing and it didn’t seem to make a difference. We didn’t move forward.” In April, she made history by testifying before the US Senate about the threat AI poses to the exploitation of artists’ work. “I just felt so humbled,” she says. “It did make a difference.”
Her new album is less political. It grew out of “a visit to Prague about three years ago, experiencing techno music there and developing a deeper relationship with dance music. It was on the dance floor that I felt Eusexua,” she says. Eusexua, a word she coined, describes “that moment of nothingness just before a big wave of inspiration or creativity or passion. I describe it as a moment before an orgasm.”
A member of her team advised her not to name the album with a made-up word that wasn’t optimized for search engines. “A lot of artists do really well by naming their project something that’s actually another project, so people accidentally find it,” she was told. “At that point, I knew I couldn’t work with that person anymore,” she says, scathingly.
Eusexua celebrated her long-running Sotheby’s gig in 11 steps, and managed to attract a crowd of the coolest art-cum-raver types from the far south and east of London to the posh auction house. They watched as Twigs and her entourage wobbled around a white dance floor, moaning, groaning, rolling on the floor and slapping their collarbones until they were completely exhausted. It was something extraordinary to behold. “The exhibition is free, so people can come along and find out more. If they find it useful, that would make me very happy. If not, you can find it abstract and different… you know?” she giggles.
In another room, her sketchbooks were on display, one of the sad pieces of paper bearing the handwritten sentence, “My body is still the same body I was in before something bad happened to it,” repeated over and over.
Releasing new work doesn’t bother her. “I’ve been making music for so long. I feel so relaxed,” she says. “Music comes and goes. People don’t like it, then they get obsessed with it and then decide it’s trash. I’m older now and feel a little more practiced. It’s funny, because in the same breath I still feel like I’m starting over.”
I wonder if being famous — she has all the trappings: 2.5 million Instagram followers, calls Madonna a best friend, is a regular at the Met Gala and was on the cover of British Vogue in April — helps her? She denies the label. “Everyone is a famous person. There are cat pages on Instagram that have more followers than me. I don’t really know what celebrity means, but I know what cultural impact means.”
She claims that the core of everything she does—releasing music, speaking truth to power, embracing the provocateur within—is really about trying to change the world around her. “I love changing the cultural DNA. Just this little molecule, and you see it spread and change people’s minds.”
For example? “To be a tiny part of changing people’s opinions about pole dancing, and then about sex work, and then about voguing and the queer scene. And then about people of color. And then about survivors of domestic violence. And then about the way people move their bodies, and the way people dress, and how you should do your makeup or your hair,” she explains. “To be a tiny part of that change — I feel lucky.”
I wonder if we are the lucky ones. Strength to you, twigs.
The Eleven, a big deal by FKA twigs, ends its run at Sotheby’s today. She’ll be performing from 10:30 to 16:30. Her new album, Eusexua, will be released next January
The Essential FKA Playlist
Eusexuality, 2024
Forget Brat’s summer — they’re already calling it Eusexua autumn.
Cellophane, 2019
Break-up anthem for life. The pole dancing video changed the conversation.
Two weeks, 2014
The one who sent her into the stratosphere.
Papi Pacify, 2013
Intimate, seductive — a favorite among many Twigs fans.