This fall, FKA twigs will release a new album called Magdalene, she’s revealed in an interview with i-D. The full-length follow-up to 2014’s LP1 will be self-produced, with major contributions from Nicolas Jaar and other collaborators to be announced, her representative tells Pitchfork. The record also features a song with Future called “Holy Terrain.”
In her first interview since 2016, twigs tells i-D’s Frankie Dunn of the extreme physical toll of returning to work after undergoing surgery to remove tumors from her uterus in 2017. Barely a month had passed when she flew to L.A. to shoot an Apple HomePod ad with Spike Jonze, she says. “I wasn’t supposed to be moving,” she continues. “And Spike’s like, ‘Okay, so we’re gonna play the song and I need you to dance around your living room to it’. I was fully going for it and literally feeling like my uterus was gonna fall out. I didn’t tell them about the surgery or that I had all these stitches in my bellybutton. It was grim. It was grim as fuck.”
She adds that on set, “The stitches in my bellybutton were splitting open. I told [Jonze]: ‘Just so you know, if I start bleeding through this white shirt…’. I basically couldn’t lift my arms up, because all your organs stick together and you can’t stretch your stomach.”
Magdalene, she says, “is about every lover that I’ve ever had, and every lover that I’m going to have.” Musically, “just when you think it’s really fragile and about to fall apart, there’s an absolute defiance and strength in a way that my work’s never had before.”
She says that when she asked Future to be on the album, “He texted back right away and I was like [throws her phone onto the sofa], ‘Oh my god, he’s just messaged me back!’ He’s such a sweetheart. I sent him the album and I called him up and was like, ‘Listen, Future… this is what my album’s about. It’s a really empowering, sensitive record, with a lot of feminine energy, and this song is probably the most fun track on it, but I still need lyrical content.’ And he said, ‘Okay, I’ve got it’. And his verse is beautiful. He’s just talking about his downfalls as a man; how he’s sorry and asking for healing. I love sad Future. I love when he gets emo, when he expresses himself.”
Read more about the album in i-D.