FKA twigs’ appearance at her own concerts isn’t a given.
She cancelled the opening two shows of her ‘Eusexua’ tour in Prague and Berlin, citing shipping issues wanting to make sure “the tour was perfect”. As a result, twigs’ show at Manchester’s Aviva Studios is the third stop on her 2025 tour and first in the UK.
On a personal level, this was also my first chance to see twigs following her pulling out of two scheduled appearances at Primavera Sound in a row.
On Wednesday night, the Manchester crowd at the Aviva Studios get the full show. Amid abyssal dark, twigs’ lithe figure stalks through the stage surrounded by cloaked figures.
For the first section of the show, Act I: The Practice, sudden spotlights reveal her body-armoured look and twigs cycles through a medley of older tracks, including hits from ‘Magdalene’ and ‘LP1’.
In keeping with her rave culture aesthetic from the latest album, twigs and her dancers contort around each other creating orgiastic chimeras of limbs over throbbing basslines.
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Act I builds to a climax with our first glimpse of the new album in ‘Striptease’.
The salacious song has a now-stripped down twigs and her dancers cavort against a central square structure’s fine fabric before it is pulled down to usher in the next part of the show, Act II: State of Being.
Now twigs settles into the brunt of the performance, swinging on ropes in the centre of the girdered structure for title track ‘Eusexua’, an uncompromising building club anthem that’s all glitches and pulsating rhythms.
In the lead up to the album, twigs coined the term eusexua as a “practice”, “a state of being” and “the pinnacle of human experience”.
The show is a paean to her central thesis of connection told through bodies writhing against each other in the dank atmospheres of underground clubs, most exemplified through the jittery percussion loops on Koreless-produced song ‘Drums of Death’.
It’s not all brute hedonism though. Camera operators burst on the stage for an interlude that parodies disinterested music journalists teasing lurid meanings out of twigs as close-ups of the artist are circulated overhead on huge screens.
This sets the stage for an intimate departure for ‘Keep It, Hold It’ and ‘Sticky’, the most reflective songs of the album. Here twigs lays bare the isolation felt in the spotlight.
An unfortunate side-effect of the camera interlude is it highlights how much the visuals backing twigs and her dancers don’t provide much to see for most of the show.
Standing in the middle of the vast warehouse stage at Aviva Studios, I can catch most of the action.
Shorter fans are left only with the epileptic lighting and the arena’s impressive sound system.
For a crowd of 4,000 people, it feels an oversight that the vast majority don’t see the breadth of work twigs has put into the show’s choreography.
After a brief performance of ‘Vogue’, pulled off with all the confidence that a Madonna cover requires, twigs finishes this central act with ‘Girl Feels Good’ to a montage of masculine fury thrusting us into a den of female desire and acceptance.
For the finale of the show, we enter Act III: The Pinnacle. Now, twigs stands alone to sing ‘Magdalene’ track ‘Home with You’.
Pared back from her dancers, twigs’ voice is left alone to reverberate through the room. For most of the concert, she’s been oscillating between dancing and slightly-too-brief moments of live singing.
Now, the sheer guttural strength of her soprano silences the entire room, which hangs on each elongated pause in the verses.
As twigs cycles through her last tracks, we build towards ‘24hr Dog’, a comparatively gentle track about submission that delicately builds to an emphatic conclusion.
Finally, she ends on the fan-favourite ‘Cellophane’. Again the crowd is agape in silence as twigs’ piercingly strong voice hits seemingly impossible highs.
The lights come up and twigs utters her first words directly to the crowd. It’s the only reprieve we get for the entire night.
For all that she strikes a distant performer, anchored to a tightly choreographed show, through the surreal experience of a club night that effortlessly weaves together the themes of darkness and embrace, her artistry is without question.
