Where Sound Becomes Flesh: Exploring FKA twigs’ MAGDALENE
The (present-day) experience of music demands an awakening amongst the senses that engages sight, sound and texture. Perhaps this is a testimony to the multidimensional role of the musician that they must adopt—not merely to create or perform music for its own sake, but to animate it through the richness of their own world-building, becoming not just composers, but architects, artists and designers. This pressure is particularly acute for those operating within or adjacent to pop, a genre where music is inseparable from image, story and persona. However, these demands do not deter FKA twigs- instead, she embraces them as she folds the multi-sensory into her art, laying the groundwork for a world fully awakened in MAGDALENE, her second studio album.
The journey into MAGDALENE begins with sight as the album cover confronts us with a vision of twigs as a humanoid entity- eerily beautiful, fragmented and transformed- hinting at the transformation she has endured (read: medically, mentally, physically and spiritually). This difference in artistry is reflected when comparing album covers across twigs’ discography: in her first studio album LP1, we are met with an illustration of twigs as she gazes into the distance, away from us, as her profile is defined by the red-pink splotches that contrasts her porcelain figure and in her third studio album EUSEXUA, twigs is positioned closely to the viewer as she is seen looking directly upon us. The closeness of her portrait exhibits twigs in great magnitude and vulnerability- her features stand as centrepieces for its extreme clarity, which are adorned in glitter and silver jewellery. Each album cover is a testimony to twigs’ constant becoming- as they stand as articulations of her different selves. Nonetheless, MAGDALENE presents us with a version of twigs that tends to the ethereal and an homage to the figure of Mary Magdalene.
“Connecting with Mary Magdalene over the past couple of years, spiritually, I started to explore [redacted], which is the idea that, as a woman, you can be pure, you can be innocent, and you can be like a fresh flower - but at the same time, you can be dangerous, and seductive, and all-knowing and healing. It’s been extremely exciting for me to know that that’s okay and it exists and I am as much sacred as I am sensual.” twigs responded in an interview about her artistic process. The figuration of Mary Magdalene has brought divine interpretation and inspiration amongst artists and theologists who find resonance in her tale of exile; aligning with journalist Eliza Griswold’s observation that Mary Magdalene has been notably idolised as a “patron saint of outcasts”. Through the many narrations of Magdalene, she has been imagined as a saint, a sinner, a nun, a mystic and Jesus’ wife. Griswold, who shares an interest in the historically revered yet misunderstood figure, observed that “Mary Magdalene remains, above all, a liminal figure and embodies uncertainty.”
Perhaps FKA twigs’ MAGDALENE offers the possibility for twigs to provide certainty. She celebrates the multitudes of Mary Magdalene and anchors the language based on her experiences, positioning herself as answering to the spirit of Mary Magdalene that guides her artistic process and the output produced- which includes the decision to not rely on religious iconography in her album cover. We feel the homage towards Magdalene most strongly in twigs’ songwriting, which is evident in the album’s titular song called mary magdalene. twigs positions herself as Magdalene and sings
I fear before the fire
True as Mary Magdalene
Creature of desire
Come just a little bit closer to me
Step just a little bit closer to me
I can lift you higher
I do it like Mary Magdalene
I want you to say it
Come just a little bit closer ‘til we collide
twigs tends to the duality of Magdalene’s figurations that paints Mary Magdalene as a subject of desire whilst simultaneously positioning her as a saviour- corresponding to the shared experience of womanhood: “I think, for me, it relates to the unpaid and unacknowledged emotional labour that women put into the world on a daily basis. Certainly ever since I was young, I was taught to nurture, and taught to be aware of myself socially, and aware of my emotions and [to] mother.”
Exploring the complexity of womanhood becomes a theme that ripples throughout MAGDALENE, as we hear twigs sing about the entwining of longing and letting go of an old life, an old love and an old way of being. Public discourse has deemed MAGDALENE as an album about heartbreak because of its alleged alignment with the public breakup and allegations of sexual assault that FKA twigs had gone through- but, twigs herself rejected this sole claim and deem MAGDALENE as an album of simply feeling: “I mean there is an element to the album which is a heartbreak album, but I think it’s also just like a feeling album. You know, it’s just a feeling album. And we’re so lucky to live in an age where to feel right now can be a superpower. That’s really uniting, and it’s nice to feel that I’m not alone in that as well.”
Twigs' sensitivity doesn't stop at emotion—it extends to the enlivening of texture, which emerges as a central force throughout the album. This is evident in its rich sonic tapestry, whereTwigs weaves together busted strings, 808 snares,eclectic sampling, operatic vocals, and poetic rhythms. So it's no surprise that the album's arrangements and melodies run deep—just a glance at the credits reveals a star-studded lineup of collaborators: Arca, Koreless, Nicolás Jaar, Benny Blanco, Cashmere Cat, Noah Goldstein, Skrillex, and Future. Koreless himself once remarked he’d never met anyone like Twigs, praising her “insane encyclopaedic sound memory.”
Perhaps it’s fair to presume that her background in dance contributes significantly to the richness of the album’s experience. Having trained in movement since the age of seven, twigs holds a deep, embodied knowledge of choreography—an understanding that transcends performance and seeps into her approach to sound. This embodied sensibility allows her to treat disparate materials as extensions of the same language, crafting a kind of symbiosis between sound and movement.
This has formed a physicality that becomes a signature in her music—a felt presence that threads through each track, making it (however crudely put) choreographable. That merging of sonic and somatic typically finds its fullest expression in her live performances, where stage design, choreography, and sound engineering converge into visceral, often breathtaking experiences. Videos circulating online capture some of these moments: Twigs’ constant collapsing during the performance of Mirrored Heart, physically enacting the helplessness etched into the song; pole-dancing to Cellophane, an act that visually echoes the spiral of grief; or the haunting intimacy of Mary Magdalene, where she descends into the audience to sing forehead-to-forehead with a stranger—dissolving the space between artist and witness. These performances become centrepieces—ritual-like moments that demand the audience’s full presence, compelling them to experience MAGDALENE not just as a collection of songs, but as a fully embodied, multidimensional work. The staging is deceptively simple: a curtain backdrop that remains closed through the early part of the set, creating a sense of intimacy and restraint, only to unravel halfway through—revealing a stark, crate-like installation suspended in the void. It’s upon this structure that her dancers hang, twist, and hover, their movements echoing the album’s tension between fragility and strength, control and surrender.
This minimal yet deliberate stage design underscores the emotional architecture of MAGDALENE, placing focus on the body—its limits, its grace, its capacity to both endure and express. In this way, Twigs doesn’t just perform music; she sculpts experience, inviting the audience into a space where sound, movement, and visual metaphor collapse into one shared, heightened state.
In MAGDALENE, FKA Twigs constructs more than an album—she offers an ecosystem of feeling, gesture, and form, where no element stands apart from another. The project’s power lies in its refusal to separate sound from body, body from stage, or stage from self. Even the album’s visual design echoes this sense of entanglement: the cover presents a digitally warped portrait of Twigs—haunting, fragmented, yet strikingly composed—mirroring the emotional terrain of the music itself. It’s an image that, much like the music, resists easy interpretation, suggesting both distortion and transcendence, vulnerability and power. Every detail, from busted strings and operatic vocals to pole-dance and poetic collapse, works in tandem to express what words alone cannot hold. It’s this commitment to total expression—this fusion of sonic texture, visual art, and somatic intelligence—that makes MAGDALENE feel less like a listening experience and more like an encounter.
What Twigs reveals, through both her precision and vulnerability, is that artistry at its most potent is not about perfection, but about presence. By integrating her encyclopedic sound memory with the language of movement, design, and stagecraft, she invites us into a world where feeling becomes form—and where healing, however fractured, is made possible through the sheer act of performance.MAGDALENEis not just heard or seen—it’s felt, deeply and undeniably, in the bones.
