At Manchester’s sold-out Aviva Studios, smoke curls around a giant, ominous black box that resembles a freshly landed spaceship. It’s the perfect warm-up act for Cheltenham-born experimentalist FKA twigs, whose abstract take on pop has always felt inscrutably alien: from 2012’s dark, trip-hoppy debut EP1 to her new club-inspired album Eusexua, her first to hit the UK Top 10. If the latter’s title proved slippery – it’s a term she coined for the elevated state of clarity she likened to “the moment before an orgasm” – this three-act show is even trickier to pin down, and irresistibly so.
A title card on a screen introduces Act I: The Practice. Twigs slowly emerges from behind the box in a dress, singing a medley that threads backwards through her catalogue: from Thousand Eyes on 2019’s Magdalene to Weak Spot from EP1. Then she snaps to the present, namely the club vibe of Eusexua. Her dancers strip to their underwear and dance to the airy techno of Room of Fools. It’s a striking showcase of FKA twigs’s versatility, held together by her acrobatic live vocal and closing in the drum’n’bass outro of Striptease.
