FKA twigs is curating a huge comeback. At the start of the year, her name popped up on festival lineups. In April, she announced her first tour dates in three years and released single “Cellophane”. Last month, she debuted seven new songs live onstage. And mere days ago, she shared a gorgeous piano performance of “Cellophane” at The Wallace Collection. Now, she’s bringing viewers into the eye of the production storm.
FKA twigs has announced the debut of Practice, a short film that “celebrates the physical training and creative process” that went into her latest music video for “Cellophane”. The video is comprised of behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, and more as she and her team spent months creating what would become a music video. She has partnered with WeTransfer — the file-sharing platform turned creative platform that collaborates with artists like Bjork, King Krule, and more — to release Practice, marking her second time collaborating with the company.
(Read: 20 Music Festivals You Don’t Want to Miss in 2019)
The whole story is pretty surreal as far as these things go. WePresent, the editorial platform of WeTransfer, has turned the news of the FKA twigs short film into a glitzy short article. The post includes dozens of high-res, gorgeous, art-like photographers, special pull quotes, and hypnotic gifs.
Practice is directed by AnAka and produced by Object & Animal. In the short film, they explore the year-long creation and training processes that went in to creating the video. Candid footage tracks the difficulty of learning the art of pole performance, and the skill it took to fuse such vulnerable lyrics with such intense yet graceful physicality. “To me it’s sick and it’s funny and it feels powerful,” FKA twigs says in Practice. “‘Didn’t I do it for you? Am I not enough?’ Like, I’m more than enough — you can’t even handle it.” Check it out below.
Practice is the type of short film that reminds you just how much work goes into creating music that doubles as art. “There was a lot of hard work that went into making the video happen — on a creative level, on a business level, on a physical level,” FKA twigs explains in a press release. “It’s all very well me going and doing a three-minute routine, that’s easy. But the difficult thing is knowing that you have the stamina and the strength to do be able to do that three-minute routine for eight hours, and that’s something different.”
Let’s hope this is just the beginning of more music to come. After all, it’s about time she released new music. FKA twigs’ last album was LP1, which came out five years ago. In 2015, she dropped the brief but surreal EP M3LL155X. If this new music and the existence of Practice suggest anything, it’s that FKA twigs is ready to have her manicured arthouse moment in the spotlight once again.