FKA twigs appeared today on Apple Music’s Zane Lowe-hosted radio station, Beats 1, to premiere a brand new track. It’s titled “Figure 8,” and, in keeping with a somewhat overarching theme for the musician in recent months, the title is inspired by voguing.
Twigs tells Lowe that the track comes from an upcoming EP she recorded back in November, though it still is without a release date or title. (Consequence of Sound, however, says that it’s “rumored to be called Melissa.”)
The song belongs very much to the twigsian world established in EP1 and LP1, though it’s got a harsher, darker vibe than much of the material on her album, with her mellifluous voice eventually twisting into a chorus of Smeagols, and the percussion seeming to become furiously entangled in itself.
The artist tells Lowe that she finished the song 4 or 5 months after LP1, and that she was compelled by the idea of figure 8 because it “represents eternity;” it was a time when she was feeling “sad and a bit lost,” trying to “hold on” to who she was after the major release of her first album. It was in New York that she started to vogue, she explains, under the dancer Derrick Prodigy, who taught her of the importance of eternity in voguing, and how every hand motion is a figure eight that flows, without stop, into the next. She said:
I was inspired by that concept… at the time I just felt like at any minute everything in my life would just fall apart, despite in a way being so lucky to have released a record and having so much success, but there was another side of me that felt like everything was shattering… “Figure 8” is a reflection of my mind-state, and landing in New York and finding something I felt I could hold on to keep me sane. I could just practice my figure 8s in a mirror in a hotel room or listen to vogue music or look at vogue legends on the internet…
The track itself begins at the 00:54 mark, and then plays again after a short interview. Listen: