MAGDALENE is as holistically complete as any pop record released this decade ... an exceptional and empowering account of an artist in full control of their sound.
By processing the physical and emotional pain she's experienced, FKA twigs’ new album MAGDALENE operates as a purging of all her heartbreak.
Magdalene goes beyond earthy boundaries and transcends to a celestial realm of greatness, guided by the “fallen alien” – FKA twigs.
Magdalene is an album that, like FKA twigs herself, defies both genre and classification.
With limitlessly innovative songwriting and production, the cinema of twigs’ music has never been more affecting. MAGDALENE is not just on the vanguard of pop, it’s in a breathtaking class of its own.
In portrait mode, Magdalene tears down the metaphorical walls — aurally, visually, physically — to build back up a wholly realized self.
The album is a knotty meditation on the process of separating self-perception from public perception, and of twigs’s reclamation of her body and work as hers and hers alone.
Magdalene makes an unpredictable turn wherein FKA twigs traverses an introverted dimension of her vision through a minimalist perspective and a sense of controlled extravagance.
Directly contrasting the cohesion of her previous releases, the veritable tapestry of sounds woven into MAGDALENE is among the album’s most rewarding assets.
Like the dancer she is, Barnett pushes through pain in pursuit of beauty and truth, and the leaps she makes are breathtaking.
MAGDALENE dances along without ever dipping into easy catharsis, consumed with pain but unwavering in its determination to fight through it.
To put Magdalene in context, it’s clear that FKA Twigs has created her best album so far. It combines the addicting complexity of M3LL155X’s production aesthetics with the more elaborate and thoughtful songwriting of LP1.
MAGDALENE is the album that twigs was destined to create. That such a blessing came out of so much trauma is a tragedy, but what a privilege it is to witness such a miraculous period of growth.
MAGDALENE is the sound of an artist gluing together the million tiny shards in which she found herself after an explosive breakup.
Never rushed yet often urgent, MAGDALENE is a work of great tension and balance. It never falls into complacency, and it’s never indulgent.
The follow-up to 2014’s LP1, made in the wake of heartbreak, is twigs at her sorrowful, scrappy best.
MAGDALENE might not be perfect, but it reverberates with the sound of someone shutting the door on a difficult chapter in their life.
Sometimes, there is the feeling that less could have been more, but when everything aligns, there are true moments of wonder to be found.
The inner battles of Magdalene will stay with you long after they finish.
With this gorgeous, gripping, thought-provoking album, she continues her enigmatic, glass ceiling-smashing trajectory thanks to some spectacular vocal performances and updating the sonic templates left to her by her forebears.
While concise in length, MAGDALENE paces FKA twigs through the unguarding of her traumas, ceremoniously giving way for her next act.
For all its impassioned vocal performances and effective updates on the forms of Kate Bush and Björk, Magdalene isn't quite greater than the sum of its parts.
Sometimes the results are stunning ... Sometimes, however, the songs are weirdly stifling.
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