MUSIC

FKA twigs Will Raise You Up

"home with you" is as visually stunning as it is sonically innovative.

FKA twigs just released her new video for "home with you."

This comes two months after she dropped the video for "Cellophane," an elegant, surreal short film that was half striptease and half Alice in Wonderland-esque journey down a kind of rabbit hole of the mind.

"home with you"—which the singer self-directed—expands on these themes, exploring the binary between sin and innocence, destruction and redemption. The video begins in a strip club, and finds FKA twigs sing-speaking through layers of heavy vocal processing. Bruised and soaked in glitter, she stalks her way through a club scene until eventually she finds her way out, winding up in a convertible, performing effortless choreography with other dancers.

In the second half of the video, she switches to full-voice singing over soft piano riffs, and the scene changes to a backyard. twigs appears in a white dress underneath billowing laundry. In the video's final frame, she undergoes a kind of seizure and pulls a child out of a well. It's a conversation between the body and mind, between innocence and experience, between hard exteriors and soft, vulnerable interior worlds.

You could also read the video as a metaphor for dealing with illness, for living in a body that rejects you no matter what you try to do for it. "home with you" could be about the sometimes excruciating experience of being trapped in one's body, about feeling damaged beyond words but finding a way to move through that pain. It's about suffering, but it also creates a space of healing, telling a story about finding inner tenderness you didn't know existed and realizing that this tenderness is strength.

FKA twigs - home with youwww.youtube.com

This December, Twigs had six fibroids removed from her uterus. In a post about what happened, she wrote, "I know that a lot of women suffer from fibroid tumors and I just wanted to say after my experience that you are amazing warriors and that you are not alone. You can get through this," she said. She went on to write about how dancing has helped her heal, reclaiming her body and mind through movement.

In "home with you," she finds power and independence through relying on and giving to others, creating, and traveling deeper into her soul. The whole project is almost painfully beautiful. It's a collage of mismatched textures and sounds that somehow cohere into a whole, using ancient religious figures like Mary Magdalene to craft visions of the future. "Never seen a hero like me in a scifi," she sings. "I wonder if you think that I could never raise you up."

All in all, it's some of the best art being made today.