Despite a total lack of scriptural evidence, Mary Magdalene is commonly remembered as a penitent former sex worker, a once-sensual disciple of Jesus who straightened out to follow him to his death and beyond. On this album named after her, FKA twigs seems to say: get somebody who can do both. On the title track, she sings “I do it like Mary Magdalene” in the context of sex – carnal, but devotional. “Mary Magdalene would never let her loved ones down,” she sings on Home With You, and neither, she intimates, would she.
She’s written about this kind of emotional labour and nurturing sensuality before on her breakthrough single Two Weeks: “Suck me up, I’m healing / For the shit you’re dealing,” promising sex that satisfies the soul as well as the body. On stage, twigs has added pole-dancing to her routines, movements that are loaded with sexuality but, as she performs them, also transcend it to become a celebration of sheer corporeal movement and self-discipline.
Twigs, then, is someone for whom the mind and body aren’t in Cartesian separation but feed off one another, and sex is just one part of it all. While making Magdalene, she underwent surgery for six fibroid tumours in her uterus; “a fruit bowl of pain”, as she described it. Illness and slow recovery are essayed with startling beauty on Daybed, a ballad she has said is about depression. “Fearless are my cacti / Friendly are the fruit flies,” she sings, as if in a fever dream. Unable to have sex, she takes matters into her own hands: “Active are my fingers / faux, my cunnilingus.”
Her Magdalenian mix of sensuality and nurture ultimately comes to naught – this is a breakup album too, with Fallen Alien full of chaos and spite, Sad Day and Cellophane full of bruised defeat. Holy Terrain is written out the other side, still eager (“my love is so bountiful …”) but newly bitter (“… for a man who is true to me”).
Love, hate, strength, weakness: this album contains all the joy and pain of living in a body, and justice is done to that complexity by twigs and her 10 producer collaborators, who include Nicolas Jaar, Benny Blanco and Oneohtrix Point Never. Holy Terrain’s beat is like a watch winding down – or is it a heart? Sad Day has the same snow-crunch as Björk’s Post and Homogenic, with one of twigs’ best top-line melodies yet. The breakup begins with the album’s very first lyric – “If I walk out the door it starts our last goodbye” – and the backing, in this case by Jaar, adds pathetic fallacy to her stepping outside: a surge of electronic noise, like a gust of icy wind, mirrors the dread of facing life alone.
“They’re waiting and hoping I’m not enough,” she sings on Cellophane in the album’s final moments, contemplating the fallout from the end of her relationship. It’s a moment of fragility, but one that’s undercut by what has come before it – FKA twigs has proved that she is more than enough, someone who can sing, write, produce and pole-dance, all of it brilliantly. Some breakup albums wallow, but this one carries itself with the strength and tenacity of its namesake.
