What does true liberation look like? If aliens visited Earth, where would they want to party? What if they invited some angels and demons along? And what if, for good measure, they brought a bed, a swinging chain, a pole, and a sword to the dance floor?
On her Body High Tour, the British pop auteur formerly known as twigs presents bold answers to these questions. In a marathon set lasting into the late hours of a Wednesday night, FKA twigs shook the rafters of the Anthem with a futuristic rave which showcased her ascent to the cutting edge of contemporary pop music.
FKA twigs started a solo career in the mid 2010s after working for several years as a back up dancer for pop acts like Kylie Minogue and Jessie J. At the time, amid a Drake-inspired glut of moody RnB acts, twigs stood out for her slippery beats, experimental aesthetic, and ethereal falsetto voice. She cemented her status as indie pop icon in 2019 with a hauntingly beautiful concept album about the New Testament figure Mary Magdalene.
Having earned massive critical praise for her first LPs, twigs seems content to spend her midcareer exploring different ways of having fun. These include 2022’s Caprisongs mixtape, which leaned toward Afrobeats and dancehall, and 2024’s Eusexua. The turn towards dance and club culture on that album proved so fruitful that she followed it up a year later with a Eusexua re-release featuring four new songs, as well as a companion album, Eusexua: Afterglow. After visa issues caused cancellation of several shows last year, 2026’s Body High Tour is many North American audiences’ first opportunity to see FKA twigs’s futuristic vision brought to life, including a date at The Anthem on March 18.
Watch the official music video for “Eusexua” by FKA twigs on YouTube:
There is a rich tradition of Black artists using science fiction to imagine a liberated (other)world. Afrofuturism took shape in the 1960s and 70s, as the Civil Rights movement encouraged Black writers, musicians, and thinkers to explore fantastic and futuristic cultural worlds through an Afrocentric lens. From Sun Ra’s space jazz Arkestra to the alien mothership of George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, the movement also included DC’s own Black Fire record label.
Whereas a previous generation of Afrofuturism leaned towards camp-y maximalism (think of the dozens of players in the Sun Ra Arkestra decked out in rhinestones and pharaoh caps), twigs’s vision of the future is both more queer and more austere. The Anthem’s stage was mostly empty on Wednesday night, flanked by looming steel structures seemingly plucked from an alien sex dungeon. Supported by a team of nearly a dozen dancers, twigs slinked, pranced, and crooned her way through a career-spanning set that featured achingly sad deep cuts, unreleased new material, and the best club bangers from the Eusexua era.
Twigs has described Eusexua as a zen-like experience of clarity and inspiration; the video for the album’s title track (whose workplace imagery recalls Severance transported to the dancefloor) describes Eusexua as “a practice, a state of being,” and “the peak of human experience;” in interviews she has also described it as the moment of anticipation immediately before an orgasm. In concert, the concept translates to a visceral and visually stunning live performance. The libido-dripping opening set by Dominican rapper Tokischa signalled the physicality of things to come.
Split over nine acts that drew from throughout her discography, the Body High setlist eased listeners in as twigs reclined on a bed, crooning the melody to “Mirrored Heart.” As two red-haired, winged dancers circled her, perhaps symbolizing dueling inner demons, twigs moved languorously through the older cuts “meta angel” and “Figure 8” and the unreleased new song “Bluebird,” a white sheet billowing ominously behind her.
It was not until the appropriately titled Eusexua song “Drums of Death” that the party really started. The song’s pummeling glitchy beat, produced by Eartheater, was the signal for the curtain to drop and the full dance troupe to appear, all bulging pecs and gleaming flesh. That kicked off a run of club bangers from twigs’s recent discography, including a fun medley of “HARD” with Caprisongs cuts “Honda” and “papi bones.” Club celebration “Love Crimes” was the occasion for all the dancers to take off their pants, while FKA twigs donned some eight inch heels and mounted a pole ten feet in the air to dance to “Techno Ballet.”
Watch the official music video for “Drums of Death (choreography glitch)” by FKA twigs on YouTube:
Many Eusexua songs celebrate the liberation found in queer nightlife, from the anonymous romance of “Perfect Stranger” to the head-empty sensual pleasures of “Girl Feels Good” and “24hr dog.” While several contemporary pop stars have mined queer and black nightlife for inspiration (Beyonce’s Renaissance comes immediately to mind), twigs’s take on the genre feels uniquely grounded in a genuine love for the dance floor and its many possibilities. On stage, these ideals found their erotic expression in the startlingly contrast between twigs’s delicate falsetto voice and the brutal physicality of her mostly masc dancers.
A trained dancer herself, FKA twigs’s Body High tour elevated club dance to high art. Twigs described her dancers as collaborators in her project, and they certainly gave physical expression to Eusexua futurism. Not exactly a dance enthusiast myself, I was stunned by the range twigs’s team displayed, from the athletic chair routines of “Drums of Death” to the ballet pirouettes on “Sticky.” Swinging from the steel girders of the set, they transformed the Anthem into a futuristic alien club. Although sometimes decked out in angel wings, the dancers’ lithe and jerky movements recalled nothing so much as demonic possession. The mood was such that it was hardly surprising when a sword appeared in twigs’s hand, and she wielded this katana while dueting a pole dance through the song “Coital Dream.”
On the Magdalene track “home with you” FKA twigs sings “I’ve never seen a hero like me in a sci-fi.” At a midpoint ebb in the setlist, as her team handed out pants and gatorade, she reflected on this line, telling the audience that she had felt lonely in the music industry until realizing that she could create her own community of like-minded outcasts. “We created this world,” she told the crowd, “and tonight we can all create our own sci-fi.”
Despite the pounding thrills of the club bangers, the quiet “home with you” created one of the most memorable moments of the night. The dancers collapsed into one large embrace as twigs began the song’s gentle choral notes. As the song progressed she gradually emerged from the pile of human limbs, as if propelled by a hidden energy. The dancers lifted her into the air and the crowd stilled to a hush as she delivered the song’s haunting melody: “I didn’t know that you were lonely/ If you’d just told me I’d be running down the hills to you.”
Just a few songs later the setlist came to an end with another Magdalene song, the devastatingly sad “Cellophane.” After spending all night leading an Afrofuturist rave on stage, twigs took the spotlight alone as snow drifted down behind her. The audience, which minutes before had been celebrating the joys of casual sex along to the pounding beat of “Perfect Strangers,” was brought to complete silence by twigs’s delicate voice singing “Didn’t I do it for you?/ Why didn’t you do it for me? When all I do is for you.” Her voice came down to a breathy whisper to deliver the song’s final lines: “They’re waiting/ they’re watching us/ they’re hoping I’m not enough.”
FKA twigs wiped a single ear from her cheek and collapsed into a waiting bed as the audience erupted into applause. After over two hours, the party of the future had come to an end.
