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FKA TWIGS- CAPRISONGS

Seventeen tracks from a mixtape made in lockdown by an artist who had spent a decade making some of the most demanding music in pop. CAPRISONGS is FKA twigs having fun, which is its own kind of statement.

CAPRISONGS, 2022

Tahliah Barnett grew up in Gloucestershire, worked as a backing dancer in London, and emerged with LP1 in 2014 as one of the most singular artists in British music — a producer, choreographer and director whose work sits somewhere between avant-garde electronic music and pop.

MAGDALENE (2019) was made in the aftermath of surgery for uterine fibroids and the end of a relationship, and it is a genuinely harrowing record. CAPRISONGS, released as a mixtape in January 2022, is the deliberate opposite: loose, social, full of voice notes from friends, and built around club rhythms rather than art-song structures.

She has described it as a record made for going out with your friends, and the framing device — a Capricorn birthday, astrology chat, friends talking — is the point rather than decoration.

What to listen for

"tears in the club" with The Weeknd is the biggest and the clearest thesis: crying and dancing at the same time.

"meta angel" is the most beautiful thing here and the closest to MAGDALENE territory — a song about self-doubt with an enormous vocal arrangement.

"jealousy" with Rema is the Afrobeats crossing and one of the best pairings on either artist's record.

"papi bones" with Shygirl is the hardest and most club-oriented, and "honda" with Pa Salieu brings British rap in.

"careless" with Daniel Caesar is the softest, and "darjeeling" with Jorja Smith and Unknown T is a UK garage record and a genuine joy.

The interludes — "caprisongs interlude," "track girl interlude," "christi interlude" — are friends talking, and they are what makes the record feel like an evening rather than an album.

"thank you song" closes it, and it is more moving than a mixtape closer has any need to be.

Go deeper

MAGDALENE (2019) is the masterpiece and should be heard whole, ideally with the videos.

LP1 (2014) is the debut, and EUSEXUA is the most recent chapter.

Her visual work is inseparable from the music — she directs, choreographs and, for "Cellophane," trained for months in pole dance. Watching is not optional.

For the world she operates in: Arca, Kelela, Björk and Shygirl.

A final note on the mixtape framing. Calling this a mixtape rather than an album lowered the stakes deliberately, and that is the point — after two records that cost her enormously to make, this is an artist giving herself permission to be light. The voice notes and the astrology chatter are not filler; they are the sound of someone in company rather than alone, which is the whole difference from MAGDALENE.

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