Cliff: Today we’re talking about LP1 from FKA Twigs

Kyle: Wow, Cliff. Just wow. We had one last month where I was kinda not sure, but I’m back to being real sure I love music again

Cliff: Just starting with an exasperated, “Oh wow, Cliff.” I– This w- this could go anywhere. Okay, what’s this about? No, it’s about the music. That’s good

Kyle: Oh, wow, parentheses complimentary

Cliff: is, in a sense, a little surprising considering if you’re doing a big genre map, this one’s not too far away from the last episode.

Kyle: Yeah, that’s fair.

also geographically not far

Cliff: Yes. Yes. They– Yes. That country little. I forget about it a, a lot of the time ’cause they have big energy and attitudes. Um, lit- little tiny imperialist space. there’s an “Lad” reference But I’m glad to hear it. I got a little worried that I wasn’t gonna feel the way you felt, and then I found some interesting ways to relate to this that I’m not sure I really expected. But it’s the type of thing that comes along with trying to get better at receiving music, which

I’m… I continue to feel like we make each other better at, and I’m increasingly convinced this is a very cool skill right now.

Kyle: I agree. I agree. And the calendar is a good tool in our practice, continues to be, because I did the thing that I think I remember you saying about RD Burman, or I don’t remember who it was, just the like, “Why did we pick this one again?” And then immediately getting into it and being like, “Oh, yeah,” ’cause it’s great.

Cliff: Yep.

Kyle: It’s so– This record came out in 2014. Was it August 2014? which is like we’ve talked about the early 2000s with N.E.R.D. and the sort of lost media era of Internet 1.0. But even more strangely, in one man’s opinion, this like immediately pre-Trump era. So like people have u- been using 2016 as sort of a cultural inflection point for a while now, but the sort of 2012 to 2016 such a weird cultural transition time that I, I think already feels lost in space

Cliff: Totally.

Kyle: in a lot of ways.

And this is the same way that “Exit Planet Dust” was like a perfect, here’s 1995 peak white boy culture, whatever. If you wanted to describe 2014 in this timeline to someone, this is the ultimate artifact. it also works because it’s a transcendent piece of art. Its influence on recent stuff is obvious, which is crazy in such a like diffuse fractalized culture.

But you’re like, “Oh, there’s lots of other s**t already that sounds like this, that is in the lineage of this.” And it’s on like best of the decade lists, which I haven’t– I can’t believe they’ve already been doing that for the 2010s. You know, like things are moving so fast, why are we even trying to bother cataloging things in that manner

Cliff: because we had a lot of time in exactly 2020 and went, “Mm, what should I think about now?”

Kyle: That’s a good point. That

Cliff: H- how about all the time before this moment that can never be reversed?

Kyle: I’ve thought about that as a person who has, like, pretty meticulously cataloged the music that has defined his year, each year. It’s like what if I pulled back, what would the 100 songs now from 2000 to 2010 or 2010 to 2020 look like for me? And it probably wouldn’t have been the stuff that I put at the top of the list initially.

Like, stuff has slow burned and grown on me, and I’ve been thinking about doing that as a reflective exercise, but haven’t done it, and maybe this will kind of spur me on. I struggled to remember how Twigs even came into my view in the first place, because I loved this record when it came out, and I had kind of forgotten about it, but not her, because she has remained a fixture, but, like, my appreciation has deepened.

I think it was Skyler Croom from He Is Legend posted on the internet, either a link to the video for “Two Weeks” or just the album cover, which is so incredibly striking and does great justice to the sounds within. But it was one of those, like, ” I don’t know. Is this up his alley? Is this… what is this thing gonna be?”

and remember being like, “Holy s**t.” And then our buddy Colin and I, I will never forget as long as I live, a lot of shows kinda come and go in the mind, but we went and saw her first Atlanta show, I think her first Atlanta show at Terminal West, one of her early ones for sure. And it was the horniest atmosphere I’ve ever been in in my life. Bordering on “Eyes Wide Shut” energy from the audience. She was incredible. She was completely captivating. I remember four or five spotlights in sort of an arc coming down on, around her as like a white rainbow-shaped thing. I remember we were right in front of the soundboard, and I distinctly remember, like, being so struck by her aura that I, like, pulled my phone out and took a picture.

I r- I remember taking that picture, and then that took me out of the moment a little. It made me look at all the other people in the crowd and was like, “Oh my God, these people are about to get it on.” So in ephemeral times, FKA Twigs is a very embodied artist. I think that’s the word that kept coming to mind is like, there’s so much about the physical body, which clearly others feel the same way.

Cliff: For totally different reasons the body the larger sense of the body ended up being my connection to this artist in a broader sense that helped me sort of peel back a little bit of the music here. What’s fun is you mentioned things being up alleys. This… I think this is good. I enjoyed it, but none of this is up my alley.

Kyle: Yeah, not a, not a casual Cliff headphone listen

Cliff: No, and the more that you know me, the more this is all about to be incredibly self-evident. Twigs is an artist that has become famous for control of her body and using it artistically, first in dance form and then in other forms of precise artistic expression.

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: I have come to a place where I can appreciate what my body can do. But I have not felt like, you know, what is inside of me is dance. And it, and it, and it must get out. I, I, I, my body must move in this way, and you, and you are actually gonna receive art. After I move my body and you watch me, you’re gonna go, “Fucking art, baby. S- absolute cinema,” right? None of that’s ever come close to me.

Kyle: Yeah, I’ve never watched you dance and been more happy to be alive.

Cliff: yeah,

Kyle: And vice versa, I’m sure

Cliff: But you– Okay. But not to take the, the sharpest turn into seriousness, but, connecting actually with the thought of what makes the body come alive and what makes you feel connected to it, there are a couple of things about twigs that made me feel like I could understand what she was putting out more specifically So in 2017, she had surgery to remove some fibroid tumors And that sucks no matter who you are, right? And that’s not awesome in any way. But she, at that time, talked at least a lot or, or enough in interviews about how that was impacting her and how she was sort of moving through it. And there was this tenacity that she approached all of this with, and she talked about how the– Like, o- o- one quote that stuck with me is she described her experience as living with a fruit bowl of pain every day.

And, like, I pretty recently had a little, I’ll explain this a bit, but, like, I had a little touch of, “Oh no, do I have chronic pain?” recently. And that, you can really read and learn a lot about what’s fun between your brain and your body, and what happens when something like a fruit bowl of pain begins to occur every day.

And the way that your brain starts to basically tell you, not only can you not do what you did before, but you’re in danger if you try it. Things are bad and wrong, and the body, like, circles the wagons and gets really, really, really serious about stuff when it thinks it’s in danger. And if you’re not careful, over time, like a lot of chronic pain comes from your brain just getting used to a signal and it no longer meaning the right thing.

And so, her tenacity of, ” I’m actually gonna… I’m going to push harder.” She got to where she was spending something like six hours a day moving her body every day, through fitness or whatever else. But, like, for me, I identify with that method. The sort of all or nothing pendulum of the thing.

If something pushes me too far in the direction of like, “Hey bud, just heads up, you’re staring into the void now. You’re looking straight at it. Heads up,” there’s something in me that, like, activates like a spring and is like, “I will actually repel that.” I’m like a magnet that gets turned around, and it’s like I would actually like to attack this entire thing, and I’m going to tell my brain what to think, and I’m gonna train my body on how it should feel.

And that– So, for, like for me you know, I may have shared this before or whatever, but like I, I had what could have been life-ending scoliosis as a kid, and I had a surgery that for a lot of people… that surgery, first of all, prevented a lifetime of basically chronic pain. And I, I was Told I probably wouldn’t live, actually, which is pretty wild.

A lot of people don’t know scoliosis can do the death. It can make you

Kyle: Can do the death.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: By the way, such a, such a known thing about you when you were younger that your senior shirt said C-Rod

Cliff: Well, I was a, a 15-year-old idiot at the time, but I see the energy from that moment and then what recurred and got better as I got older. But like, even then, there was a sense of like, I’m not just gonna prevent being in pain. I think I want to make sure that I use this body. I think I would rather look at it as like, my back is full of titanium.

What can I do that you couldn’t do? And like, you know, there were a few rules to the whole thing. The surgeon was like, “For real, if you play football or hockey, I will harm you. Like, do not do this.” And which, as a, um, a 5’9″, you know, 150, 60-pound dude at the time, it was pretty easy to go, “No worries, Pop.

No one wants me.”

Kyle: You can still do the heated rivalry part, just not the

Cliff: Yeah. Yeah. But just that whole– And like, you know, a lot of this has come up for me lately ’cause I was telling somebody about it recently, but like that connection of tenacity to the body

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: gave me… Like I was already listening to this album and had enough to say or talk about, and then it really opened up another level.

Like actually, while I don’t ever still want to dance, what I do understand is energetically, I refuse to be told that my body is supposed to be small or broken. And while I’ll accept reality, I will also push back against that as hard as I possibly can, and I will like maintain control as much as possible of my body and the what it can do and whether it can do what I want it to do for as long as possible.

And like, you know, maybe that sounds like a whole, a lot of layer to put on top of just kind of an, a cool experimental R&B and hip-hop album ’cause like the lyrics aren’t embodying all of this depth. But learning more about this person and then reapplying it to what we see here in her first record and understanding more of where she came from and her, what her, what her story was, it once again, right, helped me just see a bunch of things differently, appreciate an artist in a totally new way, and take on artistic expression in a way– Like I wouldn’t never have expected any of the s**t I just said to you

Kyle: Yeah. Yeah. I also was sitting here thinking as you were talking, has this idea of the physical body as a vessel for music come up with any of the artists that we’ve talked about before? And I don’t think that it has. You know, we’ve talked about the voice being an instrument, and that’s certainly an aspect of things here, but it’s not just the voice.

It’s not just the throat chakra up. It’s the whole physical body as a vessel for the art. You know, we’ve talked about the music, this third thing that has a physicality to it.

But, Obviously it has to come from, be made by, produced by a physical body, and that’s not a thing that’s really been a thing for us. I don’t know that we’ve had a reason to really think about it. And certainly things like dance, you know, n- neither of us are really going to, like, dance performances, thinking about ballet or theater.

We both have our own relationship to classical music, but it’s not really, like, a central… A lot about Twigs’ world is a very different world than ours.

Cliff: All that s**t is cool, by the way. We’re not gonna do

Kyle: All that’s cool, by the way. yeah.

Cliff: Timothée Chalamet thing.

Kyle: For, sure.

Cliff: But not our vibe

Kyle: I mean, my, my dance story is like, I, I was pretty like, “I don’t get it,” as a lifestyle, and then I worked at the Rialto Theatre i- in grad school, where you and I got to see some cool, incredible artists for free, like McCoy Tyner and Bassekou Kouyate and Ravi Shankar’s daughter Anoushka, and all sorts of amazing stuff over the years.

I mean, very little was as formative as a palate expander as that was the two years that I worked there. But one of the big things that the executive director, Leslie Gordon, did was really expand and elevate the dance offerings, and having to be at– Th- she, she co-produced a big festival called Off the Edge that was a bunch of different types of dance.

Trey McIntyre, Ballet Ethnic, uh, all sorts of different groups, and it was… Specifically, it was Trey McIntyre choreographing a dance to Aretha McIntyre’s “I’ve Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You,” where it was like a mode of expressing that didn’t make sense to me, put with a mode of expressing that really did, and it was like, “Oh, s**t, I get it now.

I just needed somebody to put it on my level for me to get it.” And so now I can watch dance and be like, “I see what they’re trying to do,” finally, after all these years. So, I have Leslie Gordon to thank probably for being able to appreciate Twigs on the level that I do, because I, I hear it now and I am– I put on this record and I immediately envision a big stage, and I envision a human body with a face or otherwise moving to it.

It feels like a body moving in a space. And it– I was really interested trying to listen back through for the first time without that visual in mind. Like a person with no frame of reference, what would they do with this? The same way you and I were talking about Nirvana the band, the show, the movie right before this, and it’s like, it’s clear there’s an insider language on that.

And if you’re somebody like me who had no familiarity going into that movie, does it still work? I feel like on LP1 it absolutely does. It’s impossible to set aside my bias, but there’s something so arresting. There’s certainly a like, holy s**t, this doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard factor. And the dynamics are so big that you’re like, “Well, I’m gonna stick around for whatever this is for just a minute.”

And “Prelude” starts it in a crazy way, right? It’s subtle and then it’s really, really gripping. It’s very f- it’s very filmic. it’s just a beautifully designed thing start to finish and to know that Twigs is a d- a dancer and a, a really well-honed performer at this point, you’re like, “Well, how does this debut album sound like nothing else I’ve ever heard?”

And it, there’s only what, like six, eight tracks from the two EPs before that. I think the thesis that, the big like thesis statement coming out of this for me is kinda like when we did Dolly Parton was like, however seriously we’re taking this artist, we’re not, it’s not serious enough yet. I, I am walking away after a few weeks of, of deep study of everything Twigs did on this record and has been doing since then as like maybe hopefully with any luck, if she can break through the fragmentation of no monoculture like previous generations had, m- maybe one day we’ll talk about her like we talk about Prince.

Maybe.

Cliff: I can’t say that the trajectory that she has been on artistically since this record is once again up any alleys that I have. But this provides a foundation of appreciation for all of those things, like in a meaningfully good way, and gives me enough to work with as source material and including the EPs before that to where I definitely found my…

I guess to adopt your hopeful viewpoint, uh, just like maybe Prince had eras of records that folks might like more than others, I would sort of already have mine here, which is going to continually be parallel to my feeling of unease about how she displays herself on a regular basis, which is, again, to be very clear, not a judgment in any way, but more a like, you know, I thi- this was a weird one to turn Spotify to video mode for, to be honest with you. Um, it didn’t take long before I was just like,

Kyle: Does Spotify have incognito mode?

Cliff: The, the panopticon is doing the not sure if eyes at me right now. And I could still appreciate all, all of the art that was involved in it. But extracting… Let’s see. How– Making the visual discrete as part of the art from the music immediately unlocked the rest of it for me. Like, oh, okay, I don’t dig this video, but I also am not a person who would be so good with my body that I’m probably prepared to choreograph an entire thing.

Because y- we– like we’ve sort of hinted at this, but like she was like prolific as a background dancer, like commanding twice as much money as other people, uh, highly sought after to the degree that, you know, maybe we’ll talk about this more, but like Video Girl is about how the whole world knows her as a dancer from, I think it was the Kylie Minogue video that she

Kyle: I think it was the Jessie

Cliff: You’re right. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. She did dance for Kylie Minogue, but yeah, I was trying to think of the right song. And you know that so much of this record then becomes a, you know, speaking of like magnets turning the other way. I don’t know who I am yet, but I’m not that person from the video.

Which if, if I can go to a fun meta place here with how she approaches art yes you are though. Yes, you are still that person, right? Like I, I en- the, the way she speaks about her artistry is very Boolean seeming. Like, uh, I turned this off and I turned this on, and I don’t know who I’m becoming, but I know that I’m not this anymore.

In a journey sense, sure, that makes sense. in a larger sense though, it’s, it’s interesting to think of yourself that way and compartmentalize and think about even like work… Like a, a thing that comes to mind for me on this is when she explained her name. So like her artist name was Twigs, and then there was lawyer involved, and then she couldn’t be Twigs anymore.

So F- FKA Twigs is a cool nod. That makes sense. But she’s quoted as saying

Kyle: Also very Exit Planet Dust

Cliff: Right. Okay. Yes, exactly. But she adds this little bit, which is she says ” It’s just a collection of letters. I just wanted a selection of letters that sounded quite kind of masculine and strong. FKA just worked. It doesn’t stand for anything.

It’s just capital letters.” Listen to me, it does stand for something. You can’t do that. You can’t adopt an acronym that makes sense in context and be like, “But nope, not that.” But like, that’s sort of how she approaches the thing. Like, all assumptions are empty passes so far. Ev- like absolutely anything and everything is on the table for her to work with.

And like, while my, once again, while my brain doesn’t work that way, once I saw it from that perspective, I could appreciate the music more actually. I sort of got more aspects of what’s being done in the production here and what are in some of these songs and why it changes so much if you listen to it in certain ways.

all right, I accept your brain as is. And that’s been like a really fun exercise, right? To find that I can identify with somebody who like physiologically is so different from me

Kyle: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of, um, stop trying to surf and just surf. You know, she’s extremely vulnerable in interviews. She talks about the truth, but she’s also very private, and she does a really good job of the second it gets to be the wrong vibe. She’s very in control of her body and the area around her body in a really beautiful way.

Like, uh, like the power of a great artist is to sort of affect the atmosphere around you and get things pointing toward a certain color of the light spectrum for a minute. And she, she has an almost supernatural ability to do that i- in my estimation. And there’s very– Like if you watch interviews with her, there’s some like little turn on a dime moments where she’ll get it back to like, “No, actually I’m thinking about it in this way.”

And it j- I think that subtlety is just a, a beautiful part of who she is as an artist, and it’s very dialed in. I also appreciate that her name, Twigs, ties back to the body thing because it’s the sound– it’s, it’s in reference to the sound of her bones cracking when she’d be warming up to dance.

Cliff: I laughed out loud when I read that for the first time

Kyle: I mean, that had to be something that you related to, j-

Cliff: Yeah, exactly.

Kyle: my God, holy s**t.” And she had to have gotten that name quite young, you know, younger than you associate cracking bones with. But I’ve always had knees like that, my long ass chicken legs. My knees have always done that, like warming up in football as a kid.

So I feel her on that. There is something to be said for y- you know, her m- maybe being a vessel for this type of stuff. In addition to being a background dancer who commanded the attention and whatever that she did, Her first, like, brush with fame, I guess, as an artist in her own right was she was coming home from the club.

She’d been out all night at the club and was waiting for the tube at 6:00 in the morning, and apparently looked so ethereal and goddess-like just, like, sitting, waiting for the train, that some photographer was like, “Hey, I’d like to take your picture sometime.” And those pictures turned out so good they put them on the cover of “i-D Magazine” for a special issue on London nightlife, and that was before she had any music out in 2012.

And there’s a great follow-up “i-D” Artist on Artist interview that she did with Playboi Carti, of all the f**king people where she talked about that sort of phenomenon. Like, she didn’t put music out till even the following year, but there’s a sort of when you know you know, like a destined thing. I thought about Grace Jones in that regard of the like, “Well, I don’t know what you’re gonna do yet, but looking the way you look, you gotta do something.

Like, there’s only one of you, and we need it. We need whatever is in you to transmit things from the cosmos to us.” There’s a bit of– I get a bit of that sense from stories like that.

Cliff: I remember quipping during that episode that no one’s ever looked at me and thought, “You look so interesting. What is it that you have to say?” And like once again, yep, a similar delta here

Kyle: But, you know, y- you put together some of her first-person quotes, and what struck me is that so many of those were about the slings and arrows that come with looking really unique. one of the many white male privileges is just being able to blend in and not have people, like, constantly projecting s**t onto you.

mean, at worst it’s like, “I don’t wanna talk to him. He looks f**king annoying. He looks like he wants to talk to me for a long time about something.” It’s probably the worst that it gets. That, or like, if you’re in the parking lot at the same time as a woman, them being like, “He’s going to kill me.” Those are the two things, and they’re both deserved, honestly.

But to have things that you don’t deserve heaped on you constantly because of the way that you look is– that’s a tough– That is a psychologically tough existence. It makes it hard to be in your body. so I commend her strength, which has in a lot of ways come from art.

Cliff: Totally. And for a small comedic relief valve we will not over the course of the rest of this conversation completely deify her because while I try not to judge people on their dating records Robert Pattinson, Shia LaBeouf, and Matt Healy is one of the worst lineups I’ve ever heard. So so, so there’s a little bit of, okay, we’re still growing.

That’s okay

Kyle: Yeah. I, I mean, that’s about as much as I want to say about all that because it led to some really rough s**t in her life.

Cliff: Yeah. No, yeah, totally. Yes.

Kyle: Yeah. I guess, I mean, that’s the perfect summation of e-everything, everything that we just said about White Boys.

Cliff: Yes.

Kyle: God almighty, that is, that is quite the lineup.

Cliff: But

Kyle: What’s your– Like, what is even your F, marry, kill of, of those three?

Cliff: I still think though that even that joke, I would hope that if I dated those three men, podcasts would also make quips about me and laugh. That is done with an appropriate amount of respect and lightheartedness, ’cause once again, there’s a thing that’s very different about you that until I leaned a little bit harder into what this artist is doing, would’ve just felt like distance.

And now it feels like I got a decent little memory palace going on the inside of your brain maybe. Like you’ve shared enough of this to where I can… i, I see where this corner comes into play and I can appreciate it and lean into it a little bit more

Kyle: M- man, I’ll tell you what it is for me of like the 2010s and 2020s hunt for new stuff that keeps me interested. I think a lot of what I’ve reached for, even though the past, like 15 or so years has really pushed my palate out, I reach for a lot of stuff that is gonna like feel good. It’s more feely than thinky.

I’m always gonna find great new hardcore bands. I’m always gonna find a cool new jazz artist. I’m always gonna find somebody doing some free nationals, like highly compressed drums, funky s**t, Tame Impala-y, Thundercat-y type of stuff. Like you can find your six or eight archetypes of the new version of s**t you already like.

but Twigs operates in this corner for me of like, I don’t know what I wanna watch, let me go back to my Letterboxd wishlist Björk did it for a long time. It’s like I’m, I don’t wanna regularly listen to it, but it will reset everything in my brain, right? It just straight– It’s like, uh, getting your car detailed, just completely refreshes everything and makes me look at everything a little bit differently.

I think that’s kinda where I’ve landed on all of it. It’s not some s**t I can just like cruise around listening to, but when I do listen to it, I wanna listen to it full blast, Charles Mingus loud and just be like, “Wow, damn. I spent a full day at the art gallery. I can’t believe what the human spirit is capable of.”

Cliff: I’m so glad you said that. I didn’t know if that would make sense, and you just explained the thing I was mentally trying to ramp up to. Yes. Mingus is a great example. There is a tremendous difference in experience listening to this record in different formats.

Kyle: Very much so.

Cliff: Insane.

Kyle: Very much so

Cliff: Wow. Wow. and, uh, w- we’ve, lightheartedly made our musical elitist statements a little bit before, but this is, like Mingus, a t- a tube in your amplification line while listening to this record changes it fundamentally.

N- And to the point that you just made, too, I expected this to sit more closely to cloud rap adjacent backgrounding type music,

Kyle: Yep, very much

Cliff: doesn’t work that

Kyle: It really doesn’t

Cliff: And I would’ve

Kyle: It’s a movie you cannot watch on your laptop or your phone type thing

Cliff: It, uh, it’s almost like “No Country for Old Men” or something. Like, it’s, it’s got this like, no, you must give this a certain amount of focus or it’s gonna kinda like exhaust out the window and you’re gonna lose it.

And like, once I sat down the right day with the

Kyle: It’s really thi- it’s, it’s so strange. It’s really thin when you listen to it on small stuff. Like, I was painting a room the other day and had it on, uh, one of those little cylinder Bluetooth speakers, and it sounded like s**t. And I was like, “I, I listened to this 48 hours ago and it was the best sounding record I’ve ever heard in my life.”

And I was so disappointed that I went to the other room and I got AirPods and put them in just like, I just have to hear it the right way

Cliff: Yep. AirPods will do it. They’ll bring out an interesting aspect of it. Some other tube stuff will bring out other different aspects of it. But yes, it– without the right amount of volume and amplification, replication, it sounds empty.

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: and to your point about space, what’s really weird about that though is it always has a spatial quality even when it doesn’t sound good ’cause of what you’re listening to it on.

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: But then when you… Yeah, like I, the first time I went, “All right, it’s time to just like shut the f**k up mentally and listen to this record I was truly and deeply blown away. I- immediately too. The preface immediately recalled in, you know, uh, this was not the cold listening experience, but almost the, to your point, the hard reset listening experience.

All of a sudden, two things get brought out in a, a non-track that kicks it off to begin with. One is this is spiritually related to “Deloused in the Comatorium.”

Kyle: Wow

Cliff: Oh. Oh, okay. So there’s, there’s layers, and you don’t really care if I hear all the layers or not. You put, you just put them there, and then I get to go find them later, and then when I discover them, this will feel like a room.

And like, whoa. So that plus, this, honestly, this pairing works a little bit anyway. A little bit of “Deloused in the Comatorium,” and then it immediately, you’ve already mentioned it a bit, but like, oh, this is “Homogenic.” Oh. Oh, okay.

Kyle: “Preface” and “Hunter,” uh, remind me a lot of each other. Yeah, they, they open on similar vibey notes

Cliff: Yes. So like from there on out once again, more or less have notes on sort of every track about things that stood out, but that mind frame, if that’s the right word for it, unlocked a lot of stuff about this record in a way I wouldn’t have known that it would.

And I mentioned to you it was a bit like Speaking of hello Brendan. Brendan, that makes all of our podcasts sound amazing. I was in Brendan’s house one day and we listened to “Over the Hills and Far Away” on speaker– on monitors that he had after he had run a process to… that had detected the size of the room in the speakers and then created a reflective equalization of how the sound should come out from there, and then played the thing.

it was like you could hear fingers on the faders of the producer in the studio, in the house that I knew that they were recording in. Like, you– it was like someone gave your ears acid and you could just like, “No, no, no, I perceive the texture of their fingerprint now.”

And

Kyle: I remember the first time that happened to me. I was at Brian Steely’s house and he had just invested in a crazy system, and we listened to Muddy Waters, “The Folk Singer.”

Cliff: Oh, yeah

Kyle: And I was looking at the picture of Muddy in the live room of the studio on the dust jacket, and I swear to God, it was like he was sitting right next to me in the room playing on his acoustic guitar, and it f**king freaked me out so bad.

It was a 4D music experience, and I was not ready for it at all. But that you do get that level of clarity on this record. I’m still kinda messed up over the Deleuze comparison. That n- that never would’ve occurred to me. So one, I would die for Twigs and Omar to work together on something.

That would be– Especially now.

yeah, now that they’re in their, like, full Latin jazz bag they would do something really sick together.

But yeah, the, the atmospherics of, like, “Atelevators” or something is very spiritually akin or the, the first and last parts of “Sickness” on Francis the Mute, very spiritually akin. I mean, there’s a whole punk aspect to Twigs that she never gets enough credit for. People talk about X-ray specs and her well-documented love of polystyrene, and that’s all good and well.

But she was also in a punk band herself in London called Delirium Tremens, which is a great beer and an even

Cliff: a great beer.

Kyle: even better band. Like, that’s– I was like, “Oh, that’s a f**king great band name.” You know, like, “We’re gonna go to The Earl tonight and see Delirium Tremens.” Like, are you kidding me? Delirium Tremens and The Coathangers?

Like, oh, oh, I’m so cool. I’m so alive right now in my body. I love it, man. I love it.

Cliff: Man, that delights me. Sorry, that, that reference alone, that was the first beer I ever had. Everyone has one of these beers in their life. They– you drink your cheap beer growing up, and then one day someone hands you a beer and you drink it like the normal beer, but there’s two beers in there. There’s two or three beers in there.

And by the time you’re done with it, especially for me, it’s like, uh, ” I think I’m out for the day. I’m done. I think I’m

Kyle: Quite literally the elephant and the beer on that one. They used to sell– Mine was Victory Golden Monkey, which they used to sell, they used to sell pint drafts of at Sidebar right around the corner from where I took classes in college, and a couple of friends and I had a break between classes, and we would go have a buffalo chicken panini, and Victory Golden Monkey, and I’d have two of those things, and I’d be drunk as hell in that class, just like struggling to hold it together.

So yeah, I remember those days well.

Cliff: What a time One thing that stood out to me that was interesting, going back to your kind of putting your finger on the, like, 2010 through 2020 timeframe. All right. So in a totally discrete thought process from you sharing it today, right, I had this, like, what feels weird about this cosmically, time-wise?

What, w- why does it feel odd to me? And then I kept reading retrospectives and reviews of it, and people would say things like, like the Spin review said, ” This is unconventional stuff, drug-like, elemental, extraterrestrial. L- LP1 sounds like nothing else in the world right now.” So I, in a sense, could understand what that would still mean today.

In the sense that I think that they meant it then, it sounds insane. Everything sounds like this now.

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: And the thought that 12-ish years ago this would’ve dropped and people would be saying, that it was so unusual and so unlike what anyone else was doing at the time is, to Twigs’ credit, awesome.

But like thinking about it now, it’s like how do I account for the amount that music shifted towards whatever this is? Because it didn’t take too many listens for me to go, “This is why I like SZA.”

Kyle: Mm.

Cliff: “SOS” to me is another very spatial sounding record that’s done b- in part by occasionally s- taking the production almost all the way back to silence,

and then going back to full blast, and then go…

a- and being willing to play with dynamics in a way that almost sort of breaks the continuity of the record as a pure listen to through. But in the moment, You know, probably “Pendulum” and “Video Girl” are the best examples of this, where they’re like, they’re back and then they’re forward, and it’s loud and it’s quiet, and then it comes back and now it’s distorted.

And it’s like there are these little O-overly dynamic things that most artists smooth over that then through, any, any amount of different genres of hip-hop progressing over the last decade, like those have just become commonplace ways of doing things in particular pockets, right? It’s not that all music sounds like this, but I can tell you five to 10 people probably off the top of my head were like, if you like this sort of okay it’s lo-fi but it’s involved and it’s a little complicated but not complex like y-yeah, man.

There, there is a lot of music for you right now. That it– Like the, the bedroom and COVID revolution of making music has brought us much closer to all of that. which, it, it– That’s not to say it’s negative. In many ways there’s been a lot of cool stuff that’s come out of it. But wow, that stood out to me as a surprise in how people talked about it then and, and just trying to rationalize like how much did this impact things?

Did this reverberate in bigger ways than I expected and/or was she like riding a wave here that we didn’t know? You know, m-maybe this is the same wave that ASAP Rocky was riding in America and it’s the same thing. I don’t know.

Kyle: No I was all over this. So Elliot and I, when we had the Good Old Boys blog, we were early to this party. Like

Cliff: Tumblr baby.

Kyle: y- that’s right. In, you know, 2010, 2011

to 2015-ish. sure she eventually got lumped in with what was called the alternative R&B movement with like Kelela who Elliot and I put so- something in the pre-“Cut 4 Me” SoundCloud stuff of Kelela’s on one of our mixtapes. Banks was in there, How to Dress Well, who Elliot loved, uh, Sampha, who produced a bit on this record.

but that was a– I, I would argue, it seems like Twigs would argue was a bit of a racialized umbrella descriptor for a bunch of artists who couldn’t otherwise be categorized. so on that bit, she wasn’t part of a, a movement, and they tried to put her in one, and she told The Guardian, “F**k alternative R&B.”

she insisted that her music has more in common with punk than the neo-generic term applied to any 2010s R&B-related music that indie publications feel comfortable writing about. I think we talked about with N.E.R.D. that there was still like a racial undercurrent to the, you know, this is for these type of people and this is for these type of people, and then the blog era started to obliterate all that.

And 2014 is like squarely in the place where we were getting to kind of post-blog, post-internet culture mashing de-regionalization. So I– there’s still some uneasy politics that go around all of that. so Twig said, “When I first released music and no one knew what I looked like, I would read comments like, ‘I’ve never heard anything like s- this before.

It’s not in a genre.’ And then my picture came out six months later. Now she’s an R&B singer. I share certain sonic threads with classical music. My song ‘Preface’ is like a hymn, so let’s talk about that. If I were white and blonde and I went to church all– and said I went to church all the time, you’d be talking about the choral aspect.

But you’re not talking about that because I’m a mixed race girl from South London.” So she was already contesting a bit of that. Also easy to forget The Weeknd didn’t show his face for the entirety of those first three mixtapes until he finally did a show. So there was a bit of a thing there of like, okay, we see what the internet does with preconceived notions, so let’s take that aspect out of it and retain some of the mystery like artists used to have in the ’70s if they didn’t put their picture in the gatefold.

The two other nuggets that were really like, “Oh, I didn’t realize,” or I had forgotten, were one, 2014 specifically was the year when streaming overtook physical media sales, when those lines crossed, and the politics and the economics and the everything of that have a long tail that we now know all the consequences of that s**t.

But we were at the dawn of a new world that we didn’t know what would be wrought. So the culture around music was changing, represented by that crossover moment. Two, I saw I think a TikTok the other day I don’t remember where I saw it, where somebody was like what was the worst time for music?”

And they were like, “Well, I don’t know, but look at the billboard from 2014 and it would be a contender.” So 2014 in pop music, like I’m bringing this up because one, I s- I just saw this recently and was like, “Wow, that’s very specific time-wise.” And two, the reviews you read all either say explicitly or allude to this is different.

It was like othering it from some perceived norm in some way, right? Positively, complementarily, but was saying it’s not. It was defining it by what it wasn’t. So 2014 in pop, Pharrell’s “Happy,” that f**king horrible thing, Katy Perry and Juicy J’s “Dark Horse,” Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” the abomination of every Target superstore, Eminem and Rihanna’s “Monster,” rise of Sam Smith, Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” “Uptown Funk,” Florida Georgia Line, Luke Bryan, U2’s iTunes, put it on every phone in existence fiasco.

So all that’s happening in pop. Contrast that with, you know, we think it was all gravy in the Obama era and s**t got really dark 2016 on. 2014 was Ferguson. It was Michael Brown in Ferguson. It was a f**ked up year, and what was happening in big glossy commercial like let’s sell you some nice flowery clothes moment just did not reflect the reality for a lot of people.

So there was, there was dissonance that was starting to bubble up between pop culture and counterculture in those moments. So I think somebody like Twigs is a natural outcropping. Like we were ready for singular things like that. And, you know, there were other things that like, I don’t know, the internet, the wisdom of the crowd can occasionally get it right.

I think about was either 2011 or 2012, Tyler, the Creator on Fallon, you know, little moments of like how did, how’d that sneak through the gates? How’d we let that happen? And Twigs I think is pretty, would be considered pretty big now, culturally pervasive. Like she has been in a movie and TV and certainly has a huge cult following.

But like the streaming sales crossover bit is really in sharp relief here Because you read on her Wiki, “LP1 debuted at number 16 on the UK Albums Chart, selling 4,051 copies in its first week. Debuted at number 30 in the Billboard 200 with first week sales of 10,370 copies. As of August 2015, a year later, the album had sold 77,000 copies in the United States.”

Great numbers. Paltry numbers compared to physical sales time. So it’s at the very beginning of the era where we lose all grip on scale of an artist that’s now led to, “Hey, this artist can probably sell out stadiums,” and yet on Ticketmaster we have blue dot fever. And I’m not saying that’s at all a phenomenon with Twigs.

I’m just saying there was a monoculture with the metrics of penetration, of success, of whatever for an artist, and that’s just not reliable anymore. So, like, Twigs was maybe a, a bellwether for what was to come. But to answer your question, I don’t think she was part of a wave of anything. I think there was a recognition of a sort of singularity with what she was bringing to the table.

I remember feeling pretty distinctly like, “Oh, whoa, this is something different.” And even, in fact, Sasha Frere-Jones, who I would put on the level– We talk about Robert Christgau all the time on this podcast, but Sasha Frere-Jones is like one of my favorite, most reliable musical minds, one of the few people who if I truly am not sure how to feel or I, I wanna expand into a challenging new direction, I’ll just go seek out what he’s been writing about. I can always count on at least an interesting thought from him, even if I don’t ultimately agree with it. And even he didn’t really know what to make of it, and he’s like a guy known for his precision in finding the essence of a thing. But he said the sounds on the album span such a wide range that it’s hard to know what to call any of it.

So that gave me sympathy for the alternative R&B tag. As a person who hates genre labels, it’s like this is so expansive and so novel a combination, I gotta call it something because it’s so many things. I don’t wanna risk it being nothing when it feels like it could be a lot or everything, you know?

Cliff: Totally

Kyle: Language is fallible in that way.

Cliff: I think maybe hitting specific tracks would be a helpful way to draw out not only surprising stuff on cold or cold start listen, but also, like we tend to talk about, things to focus on if they’re there and sort of what to do on the other side of it. This one feels to preview that last bit, as wide open as any music that we listen to.

There are so many ways to get energized by what’s happening here, and to the point of our discussion that we just had, if it feels like it only points in one direction, you’re looking at it wrong for sure. I think Starting kinda at the top, like I mentioned, your preface really started blowing me away when I put it in the right context, listened to it the right way, and heard aspects of it that I hadn’t before. as soon as “Lights On” hit, two things, a simple thought and a less simple thought occurred to me at the same time. One, a thing to listen for and a thing that to me is like a, a wild card bit that changes so much about this record, even though it’s a simple fact, is, oh, that’s like an acoustic upright bass thing

Kyle: Yeah. Yeah

Cliff: like just the choice to do that in this scenario, in otherwise music that is attempting to be really expansive, uh, and spatial and have a lot of detail to it. I mean, bass in general is usually the checkbox area for a lot of people. We will pipe this through, you know, one of three or four different tonal things.

Uh, and otherwise we’re just gonna like synth this out, sequence it, whatever, and then everything else is on top of that. In here, like I love that you mentioned Mingus already. Like in that very same sense, there is a, a, a aliveness and quality to the bass in a lot of these songs that will change the quality of what you’re listening to when you focus on it

Kyle: Yep

Cliff: And “Lights Out” was the very first moment where it’s like, I– okay, this is gonna give me a totally new kind of rubric for listening to the rest of this

Kyle: I agree so wholeheartedly. I don’t think bass is the thing to focus on for me personally, but I was sitting and thinking and I was like, you know, there’s so many reviews that describe it as like cold or icy. There’s so much higher mid-range to treble stuff happening here. So much of the real action occupied is like in the higher end of the range.

And I’m like, why does it work? And thinking about the it didn’t work as well on a little tiny speaker because only that stuff comes through. Low end is the part that makes this record work. It grounds it, it makes it more elemental, it makes it more physical feeling. I wrote that there’s the exact right amount of low end and dynamics in the same way that I noticed it with the instrumentation.

Oh, I like it when the bass comes in, after a minute or so in the song. I also like that in her vocal variety. Like Twigs often gets talked about for the like quiet, the breathy, the whispery, the, the very high end of her range. But I like it when it gets down more in the Aaliyah range and you’re like, “Wow, holy s**t, she can sing.”

Like the kind of more soul singing type of stuff versus the more, choral and, uh, I guess, almost like operatic type stuff or the breathy the sort of like cursive adjacent singing. But yeah, low end is so important. I’m so glad you pointed that out.

Cliff: The other simultaneous thought that’s less… Is this a pun? That’s less base, is this is the first moment on the record where lyrically she brings this ostensibly sexual bit. And like this, this really delights me, man. So much of this is obviously sexual on purpose and about bodies and all that stuff is great.

I find it hilarious that the, the first real song on the record has a hook, “When I trust you, we can do it with the lights on.” And once again, just, just how she’s like, “FKA doesn’t stand for anything, those are just letters. Do not let yourself be fooled.” She is also like, “This we can do it,” is a phrase that’s just describing anything that we can do together, because when we are trusting each other in vulnerability, you can metaphorically have the lights on and be vulnerable with your partner.

And it’s like, okay, yes, I love that. I am 20% suspicious that you added that justification in later because it feels that way a little bit. But also I love that. Okay. I love the underlying message of

Kyle: brother, that’s just write, that’s write drunk, edit sober. That’s all that is.

It– The insight came when it came

Cliff: But like the, the constant sort of intentional uneasiness of the sexual layer is, once I accepted it, hilarious in this record. Just like the whole treatment of things becomes, in a sense, funny at the same time that it becomes really serious to me. And that sort of allowed me to, from here on out, accept and understand the expression of a lot more of what was happening here.

Kyle: Well then you’re gonna l- you’re gonna love this Cliff Seal ass quote that she had. On ‘Preface,’ I sing a quote by a poet called Wyatt.” Have you seen this from her Pitchfork interview?

Cliff: N- no Jerry Seinfeld. I have not seen this. I have not heard of this.

Kyle: What’s the deal with FKA Twigs?

Cliff: I know what you’re referencing, but I don’t know the quote

Kyle: on the opening song “Preface,” I sing a quote by a poet called Wyatt: “I love another and I th- and thus I hate myself.” It’s inscribed into the vinyl. So it’s called “LP1,” but for me, that quote is the subtitle. You could apply that line to anything in my life for the past two years. “I love another and thus I hate myself.”

come on. Come on, Cliff

Cliff: I don’t know what I am, but I’m certainly not that

Kyle: That’s right.

Cliff: Incredible energy. but then right on the, by the next track, “2 Weeks,” which became, you know, a hit single on its own you’ve sort of famously got the lyrics of, “My thighs are apart for when you’re ready to breathe in,” and it’s so directly sexual that like apparently in places they were editing out the word thighs.

Kyle: Wow

Cliff: whi- which Always feel strange that we have ever done that. Like, for all of history, it will be weird to me that we made versions of music where we were like, “Mm, cert- certain words we’re going to make sound over this so you can’t tell what it is.” And it’s always only one hop away from kids bopping the thing.

So then anytime something ridiculous gets edited out, my brain goes to like, how could I have rearranged this sentence to be allowed to, uh, play it as a children’s song? Uh, and so that one gave me a lot of fun thinky time.

Kyle: She does hip hop bravado so well, and it, like, doesn’t really read as that until you read the lyrics of a song like “2 Weeks.” “Higher than a motherfucker dreaming of you as my lover” is, again, maybe kind of Grace Jones, but there’s so much, That whole song, if you just read the lyrics on Genius, you’re like, “This is a rap song.”

It doesn’t sound like one when you’re listening to it, but like, this is a rap song, and that’s tight Also, how many songs have we, how many songs have we covered where they name a specific tooth? Talking about incisors And then rhyming something with incisor. Like that’s… I love it The body keeps the score

Cliff: Again, then rolling through some more songs as well, like, so I kept then being surprised once I paid enough attention to the production depth, and “Hours” is another example of deceptively layered music that obscures itself if you’re not listening in the right context or the right moments And then to harken back to an, a bit of an earlier joke in reference here, I was in video mode when “A Pendulum” came on, and I just wrote a note to myself that I said I can’t say that watching the videos were really helping me with the vibe, and I’m not really sure how this is supposed to make me feel.”

Kyle: Amazing

Cliff: Thank you. That statement stands. Uh, my journal entry for this podcast about that song still makes sense to me now. I don’t know what it is that it is expressing, but boy, is it expressive, especially in video form Once I turned that back off, ’cause that had officially distracted me completely, it mostly went back to just maybe being my favorite song on the whole record.

Kyle: Pendulum

Cliff: yeah. And specifically when I started noticing the little bits of sonic storytelling that they were doing. And in this one, the noticeable bit was how after enough repetitions towards the end of the song, it starts subtly distorting itself a little bit more over and over. And that whole concept of pendulum actually had a tactile feel to it. And like, that became the, the cycle that I would keep going through with these songs. And, and that was a, a big sort of moment on the first real attention paid to the full listen through is like, by that point I was like, every song has something that I need to pay attention to. I now tr- I trust the rest of the record in a way that only happens when you get enough upfront on one.

You know? A s- a slow burn is a little bit more of like, I don’t know what I’m doing until this really shows up. And with this one it felt like it pretty immediately started cresting, from these really interesting moments. And then obviously “Video Girl” was, kind of the top of the bell curve.

Kyle: I do think that’s a great observation. If you put on the record from “Preface” and you do “Preface,” “Lights On,” “Two Weeks,” and you’re like, “Mm, I’m not sure,” and you’re about to pull the rip cord and turn the record off, come back to it and start at the midpoint. Start with “Pendulum.” cause the, the best textures on the record for my money are on “Pendulum.”

The, the two things that grabbed me were the drums sounded like “The Beautiful Ones” by Prince. They had the same, like, sort of clap and reverb. and then the vocals were very vocoder-y in a way that reminded me, for like a millisecond it would feel like Imogen Heap, and for a millisecond it would feel like Black Moth Super Rainbow almost, where it would be like, you know, the sort of old PBS graphics of the, like, dragging rainbow trail type thing.

It was very visual in my mind. So very textural on that. And I agree with you where when it starts to build up to distortion, which is a cool underrated move like intentionally f**king up the dynamics in the build or the, the quality, eroding the quality in the build is a, cool thing to do. I I also, going back to “Hours,” that was the one that specifically made me laugh out loud thinking about talking about it on this podcast because I was like, ” I can kiss you for hours,” hearing that over and over, thinking about you, like, being out in nature listening to that, was like, well, we’ve been joking on the podcast about how much more comfortable Cliff is talking about intimacy and that sort of stuff.

But that’s just weirder. I mean, that is so much rawer than, like, Megan Thee Stallion type intimate talk. Like, here, here’s just two friends talking about kissing for hours on the next episode of TuneDig. It’s vu- it’s like very vulnerably intimate It’s quite a

Cliff: is well made, but I enjoy that that’s the line you brought out and not, “Who’d have thought I’d be here in your mouth?”

Kyle: But that’s almost Mars Volta-y. That’s got a surrealist quality to it, right? Like

picture

Cedric ”

Cliff: I have spiders in my mouth”? Yeah, totally.

Kyle: Exactly. That could be anything. It doesn’t have to be… Yeah. You, could be a piece of candy. also worth noting on “Hours,” like there’s a bit of a super groupie thing happening there.

Like she got Blood Orange, your favorite, Clams Casino, Emile Haynie, who produced Adele’s “Hello” among a s- a huge list of other enormous, enormous things. Emile is a huge producer. And Arca, who was like a formative collaborator early in Twigs’ career and has gone on to have a very cool experimental arc and cult following and all that.

Arca is somebody else very cool. but I was just surprised to see that many people deployed on that one thing. And for my money, like not even one of the top three songs on this record

So it is pendulum for you. That’s your jam on this record?

Cliff: I think so. I learned to appreciate other bits, but that’s the one I keep coming back to for sure

Kyle: It’s “Numbers” for me.

Cliff: Mm.

Kyle: the production grabbed me immediately, and I think it is worth noting that Twigs produced or co-produced every song on this record. That is one of the things that w- I was very surprised by. Like, how do you come up with a sound like this, normally with collaborators helping you form a sonic palette so that like she had a hand in all of it really shifted my view.

but “Numbers” felt like I wrote down fractalized Aaliyah. but it’s one of those examples of the vocals where I was talking about like it’s, it’s a bit in the lower register, it’s more present, it’s more full. It’s a bit Aaliyah, it’s a bit Beth Gibbons, but you’re like, “Man, she could really s- I’d love a whole album of this type of thing on more straightforward production,” but then it wouldn’t be Twigs.

and similar to the distortion bit, there’s a big synth swell on the back half of “Numbers.” but yeah, that’s definitely my favorite song on the record.

Cliff: That one has another good example of the simultaneous over-under thought happening here. The

You know, I can appreciate the wordsmithiness of that song, first of all, just the… Was I just, uh, even just, even the fact that it’s like ascending, the way that it stops, the way that the, the cons- the concept of being the number gets implied through all the…

All that’s great, right? But she also noticed or noted, quote, “That there’s exaggerated breathing that disrupts the sentence.” And in the liner notes for this record was des- those… That disrupted pause was described as a sob.

Kyle: Oh,

Cliff: supposed to be read like i- if you were reading a poem or a stage play, I guess, it would have brackets that says sobbing in between every line.

And like, um, okay, I wasn’t able to pull that out from the original source material. Not totally sure if that helps me go back to it in a different way or not, but it fits, and it makes sense, and it works, and it speaks to the depth of I’m gonna go really, really hard in the paint on whatever this one specific premise is here.

And like, just like “Video Girl” before it, like there’s a full sort of artistic commitment to this particular point that’s being made. And This was another good example of the method I had for relating myself to twigs. I couldn’t say, honestly, that I’ve had a lot of times in my life where so- where someone used me for my body, and I thought, “Am I, am I just a number to you?” and, uh, while I accept that as my plot in life I found ways that her commitment to the bit, so to speak, in that thing still enabled me to connect to it. So no, I haven’t felt this literal way, but that sense of in a broader way w- what are people doing? Can I not be sincere?

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: and you know, you, Kyle, know better than almost anyone on planet Earth that that’s sort of my little perpetual gripe with all of reality in general.

It’s like the moment I try to be sincere, some s**t clamps down on me in the worst way possible, and all I want is to be a, an unfettered, sincere person who also makes jokes all the time. And like, again, so coming– being able to come back to the lyrics, tie together the music that’s happening in it and in what the artistry is actually supposed to be through the production of the song, took a song that otherwise would’ve just been like almost a skip level thing to me into like, now that’s a hook I appreciate and love now.

I can sing this for myself without feeling weird about it

Kyle: In the s- in the same way. I remember when we talked about Rihanna you talking about the “Sex with me is so amazing” hook. The last thing I would’ve expected you to say out loud on the, on the podcast, but you never know what stuff is gonna get its hooks in you, truly. Truly, truly, truly.

Cliff: It’s true. Just wait till we get to Kicks

Kyle: Oh . I was like, “Kix Brooks of Brooks & Dunn? How’s he figure into this?”

Cliff: Yeah. This pod- this c- the podcast is just now, uh, six degrees from Brook- Brooklyn Dunn,

Kyle: I, I mean, truly that has been one of my favorite parts of the body of work is seeing how different people are expressing the same universal ideas and what it reveals to me in the Rorschach test of my own life. And I take it as a little bit of a challenge every time we do one of these now. Like, what’s the most tangential connection that I can find between two of these artists?

‘Cause I think I use that word vessel for Twigs, but they are all vessels to express ideas and feelings that words can’t get to. and Twigs is as prime as an example of that as anyone. so now not only do I wanna see a Twigs, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez collaboration, I wanna see a Twigs, Brooks & Dunn.

What does Twigs dancing to “Neon Moon” look like? “Watch your broken dreams dance in and out of the beams of a neon moon” is not a lyric that would be out of place on this record. The sentiment certainly is all over this record

Cliff: 100%. Just with 20- 2015 vibes instead of 90s cigarette smoke vibes.

Yeah right. 2015 UK rave, out all night vibes

Then right after “Numbers” is “Closer,” which once again gave me a surprising angle to understand. This one, though, was more direct and obvious. This is like a choral song. Like the arrangement of the vocals is very choral and like I don’t give a f**k what anybody says. Singing in a group of people who are good at singing is tight.

It’s really fun. Yes, you can sing… Well, actually I’ll say it this way. You can have fun singing terrible songs with people who are really good at

singing. It feels awesome. Now there, you know, may or may not be entertaining to experience on the other end of it, but like getting to do it is pretty rad.

And this reminded me of the best moments when we would make really kind of anthemic bits in chorus music. We would really start building and layering and doing interesting things with each other’s, you know, different vocal registers and stuff. But then to me you know, speaking of spatial qualities in these songs, this one had a real visceral image to it where we’re in a chorus supporting Twigs and she goes full Björk mode where it’s like she starts singing with us and then it like increasingly devolves into something more ridiculous where it’s like, wait a minute, where did she get Peter Frampton’s talk box?

What, how, what, where, where did she get a Bop It to make these sounds from? And like, just like it, it took on this quality of the end of King Gizz shows where they’re just like, “Hey we found 63 synthesizing machines backstage and we put them on this table. We’ll be doing this until you leave.”

Kyle: Right.

Cliff: Like it– and Man, that, that, that song in particular just like really spread out for me and took on a, a fun quality there that helped me once again to appreciate that there is like an actual like diversity of musical approaches embedded in a really coherent vibe here. That like there’s like extraordinarily different songs that still feel like they belong on the same record, and that’s really hard to do, and once again, calls to Björk pretty specifically.

being able to build a little tiny world and then really live inside of it for a whole thing is really hard to do. And, you know, by, by the time I was sitting closer, I came to appreciate this particular aspect about this album.

Kyle: We’ve laughed about it a couple of times, but the Corpus Christi carol on “Grace” being a like, “What the f**k?” But it wouldn’t be “Grace” without the sort of off-speed pitch aspect of that, and “Closer’s” got a bit of that. I was thinking that “Closer” would be interesting as an a cappella,

as just the vocals, and it would be sort of an Enya type thing going on.

But that beat is nuts. Could also sort of be a rap beat in the right hands, and it evoked some of the stranger stuff that I was getting into around that same time, like the Triangle Records stuff, like Haxan Cloak, and he’s gone on to do like score work. It’s a bit m- maybe

Yeezus-y j- just a touch. but it’s more like that experimental sort of dark wave stuff in those percussion sounds. And, I’d be remiss, one thing that I felt like we didn’t talk about enough on the Sade episode was what a visionary she was in terms of all aspects of her presentation. Like Sade was an art student, and so the visuals and everything all went together.

Twigs directed, I believe, the “Pendulum” video on this and was like a co-art director on the look of the record. But the thing that really got me was, I mentioned earlier she co-produced much of the album herself, but the– she taught herself Ableton and like manipulating EQs to build a unique sonic palette.

The, the thing that I was really like, “Whoa,” was one of the techniques that she developed was generating synths entirely out of drum sounds, doing things like reversing, tuning, adding effects to hi-hats, and then playing those notes as percussion layers. But just like drums can be synths and vice versa, and so you get on a song like a “Closer,” you’re like, “Is that a percussion?

Is that a synth sound?” Well, the answer in many cases is with Twigs’ sonic palette, it’s probably both. It’s probably just a mutation of both, which I think is really, really cool.

Cliff: I just want to draw out one thing you mentioned in passing. You mentioned a little bit of relation to maybe Yeezus.

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: And there is such… And in speaking of more like kind of endearing things, first of all, finding out that she was… She’s basically our age. So her like j- a year younger Yeah. I think. Yeah, like close enough to where similar

Kyle: The specific area of millennial, like getting on the internet at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Cliff: so just telling this story will make a bunch of people listening activate and lock in immediately to a thing, and everyone else will have no frame of reference whatsoever. So, Twigs talks in an interview about how, like, one of the most, like, motivating and sort of life-changing experiences for her was “The College Dropout” coming out and then her getting Kanye tickets because she specifically wanted to go see “Jesus Walks.”

And, like, Jesus Walks” was a whole, thing. There was, like, a whole cultural bomb that went off around that, and it didn’t come with any of the baggage that we now have with that artist and all that. It was just this song rips, this video rips, my whole life is about this now. It, it was everywhere and it was huge.

But then the way that Kanye at that moment could then translate that hugeness, especially and specifically into those first touring moments, were like, I’m… There are probably 100, 500 stories like Twigs of like, “I’ve, I went to that Kanye West tour and my approach to music changed after that.” Because, we did a whole episode on this, right? But, like, this was when I would almost say very cautiously threading this needle at that moment there was a purity to what Kanye seemed like he was doing that feels very similar to what Twigs was trying to do when writing this record. “I am better than almost everyone who writes music, and I am about to show you.”

The attitudes were totally different. The approaches might have been different, right? And, you know, uh, the, the way that the music gets built was different in both of those cases. But the energy of, “I have an ego that is so big,” but then also, “You’re one of the very few people on the planet where it’s maybe calibrated correctly in the moment, so show us what you got.”

Man, that really helped me once again connect to the energy of all this. I could also imagine a version of myself in the 2012 to 2014 timeframe where it’s like, “I have given myself to music and I no longer exist.”

Kyle: Oh.

Cliff: You know?

Kyle: Oh, so good

Cliff: And I just I love how much all that timing lines up because it, it really… Those, those types of moments feel like they’re never gonna come back again because of the diluted nature of how we experience art and music now. And that was right, to your point, like right at the end of when we switched over to streaming and the nature of so many things changed and, you know, it kind of became harder to release these singular cultural moments.

And so it’s cool to think about all that and think about this being a person who experienced the world in a really similar way time-wise to what we have. Obviously, her experiences are very different for a lot of reasons. But matching up time when we’re usually doing time sequence comparisons in these episodes, uh, has been sort of a bit of a relief, like both, both for this episode and the next one.

Like these are just, these are people that are about your time on Earth, uh, and, and we can maybe share a few frames of reference.

Kyle: I really wanna believe– So that’s a great observation, but I really wanna believe that you’re wrong about it not happening again. Uh,

Cliff: Cool. Yeah. I

hope you’re right

Kyle: in my logical brain feel like, yeah, he’s right. It’s it’s so over. It’s never been so over. and I was clamoring for examples like, well, what about Turnstile?

What about Rosalía? But it, the scale at which those are happening in a room, getting lots of people in a room to do a thing pales in comparison to the amount of people outside of the room who are also like feeling some resonance from it. But there is something about young people going to the movies, people under 35 are accounting for more than 50% of all movie theater visits in the past year.

Physical media, not vinyl, not an in vogue medium, whatever, CDs, tapes, like just like physical media writ large is having a moment. in-person connection and community building of different kinds is experiencing little pockets of resurgence We haven’t figured it out culturally at scale, but there are a ton of signals to me that there is a desire, not necessarily get, to get to monoculture, ’cause I don’t think we’ll ever achieve it in the way we had it pre-internet.

I’m not so foolish as to believe that will ever happen. Everything is telling me that inasmuch as there is still a collective consciousness amongst our species, there is a desire to share something, to revel in, that somebody like a Twigs or, you know, God forbid, a Kanye West could chant– like could hold up their arm and pull down lightning from Mount Olympus and hand it to us mere mortals type of thing.

And sorry to deify her again, but I do… There is just something like sort of beyond explanation about her to me, that I, I haven’t really found the words to account for yet. What was that YouTube comment that I s- that I texted you earlier?

Cliff: Nobody doing it like

Kyle: nobody doing it like Twigs. I mean, at the very least, that’s so true.

You know what I mean?

Cliff: 100%. let me put a finer point on this one. Nobody doing it like Twigs. Let’s talk about the song “Kicks.”

Kyle: Let’s do it

Cliff: so as some, some sort of cosmic joke that I, uh, have foisted upon myself, the last song on this record is just about masturbation.

Kyle: Depressive masturbation to be specific

Cliff: Yep. Great stuff. Something I otherwise would’ve been like, “Well, this will at the very least be fun to talk to Kyle about

Kyle: Great stuff

Cliff: this podcast that I choose to do.”

I did this to myself. and yet not only is it fine it’s a fine song. All right? I found myself singing it, and it’s really funny when you find yourself singing it ’cause I don’t have all the parts that make all the lyrics make total sense. But nevertheless, it’s a fun lyric to sing out loud.

But it gave me, speaking of strange connections, it gave me my strangest connection or what feels like one of my strangest connections. I mentioned this earlier, like something I observed throughout the record, and I would encourage people to like actively listen to this. We talked about how well the bass works, which is just sort of surprising when you consider how simplistic the approach is, but like it just works and the production is harmonious.

the levels and layers are so coordinated with one another that it reminded me of Converge and specifically how in production… Like one of the things we’ve talked about for a long time is I love Converge’s production for a lot of reasons, but one of them is the vocals are like 15% lower in volume

all the time, and it creates the wall of sound thing that creates the visceral feeling of what Converge actually sounds like.

And like whether they’re doing it to sound like they do live or not is sort of beside the point. It is true. Like that is a phenomenon that exists. And so in that same way, really on “Kicks,” the way that the beat is positioned in the mix, especially in the main like hook and chorus, it feels perfect. I really don’t love to use like judgment-y words to talk about music, but like it feels like the right answer for everything that’s layered in there in the production. And for that to be true not only in your most in-depth listening experiences, but also when you’re listening to it on a thing that makes it sound like s**t, it still works And that man, by the time I got to the end of this and was having this sort of funny moment of like lyrics I laugh at the most combined with music that I respect the most happening at the same time, I don’t know if I am turned on or not.

Like, I don’t… How d- like how do I feel in any sense after listening to this? And like, I don’t have a good answer, but I do know that it feels a little bit like the constantly shifting nature of how she describes all the music. It’s just like, well, I don’t know. It’s not this, it’s that. Don’t think too much.

It’s not this. Those, those words don’t mean this. It means this other thing. I’m not this, I’m not that. I may be something else. I don’t know. I’ll see who I become. I’m like, man to end up on the other side of a record like this, which is not otherwise some sort of linear conceptual record about any of that stuff, to feel like I actually made through a, a narrative journey and ended up in a place where I understood someone better, was really surprising to me, even as a person who listens to a lot of fucking music and kind of expects to be able to understand people better at the other end of it.

this feels like every now and then you get to interview somebody at work, and you get the rare occasion where someone’s interview vibe actually matches up with the person that they end up being after you hire, and you’re like, “Damn, how did you do that?” ‘Cause like most people don’t, right?

They’re gonna oversell, and then we get whatever’s left of you once you show up. Um, but to be able to have like the presentation and the substance align so incredibly, and once again, for this being the first full-length record from this artist at all, is pretty awe-inspiring. Encourages me to go back to whatever it was she was doing in 2012 to 2014 and thinking about like, do I need to reevaluate the way that I put myself into things, and is there something else that I could be doing that, like we talked about, in 10 or 15 years is gonna feel so obvious?

Everyone’s always been doing this. Why weren’t you doing this already? It’s like this, this really opened me up to that way of thinking about things, and I didn’t expect to be hopeful about the current reality in any number of ways, but this gave me a, a foil for it a little bit. Doesn’t actually make me hopeful, but makes me curious, and I’ll take that.

Kyle: I think what you’ve just described is a beautiful illustration of what we were sort of half joking about at the beginning of at the end of this, it just felt like art, like capital A art. Wow, I, I got arted on this one. That, that’s what it is. Like you’re, you’re like, ” I can’t describe the way it makes me feel quite yet, but it really makes me feel, and I feel seen even though this has nothing to do with me.”

You know? You just feel profoundly connected to the human experience. Like you could feel more yourself, more alive. It does all of those things because it’s such an embodiment of who she is, and we’ve never seen anybody quite like her. And so in trying to unpack her journey over the course of the record of exploring and sort of trying to assert who she is and isn’t, you’re doing that unconsciously, subconsciously for your own self.

and so that’s my sort of earnest thought. but my other one that you really sent me down a rabbit hole once you mentioned Converge was, what Converge song titles could be about masturbation, wrong answers only. ” I Can Tell You About Pain” You Fail Me, Aimless Arrow, The Saddest Day Bitter and then some Love Is Not Enough, Sadness Comes Home Tinder abuse?

Cliff: Dark horse?

Yeah.

Kyle: First light, last light

Cliff: Cloud.

Kyle: When forever comes crashing Viscera of Men from Blood Moon

Cliff: My God

Kyle: To feel something

Cliff: As usual, you and I have found complementary inverse directions. I’m over here trying to, like, be serious and heavy about my sexuality, and Kyle is like, “What if we played a name game with song titles?” Tight, dude. It opened us both up in fun ways, just, like, really stretched out our hips for different reasons.

You can hear all of our bones and muscles popping around and cracking

Kyle: But the older I get, the more I realize that’s what it actually is, right? It’s not about like being good at a thing. It’s about feeling totally safe and comfortable in your own body, which is like the whole point of this record. You’re the most yourself when you’re like, “Yep, this is the vessel that I’m in and I’m with it.

I’m doing it. I’m gonna move it around throughout this time and space.”

Cliff: Yes

Kyle: And that’s not a thing that I’ve ever looked for or asked for from music, even though I’ve long said that my favorite line in all of music was from “Whiskey Rock A Roller” by Lynyrd Skynyrd, “I don’t care for fancy music if your shoes can’t shuffle around.” This is a really elegant, elevated album devoted to just that and, and sort of philosophically interrogating on some level what that means. So the country boy in me really appreciates and can relate to that a lot.

Cliff: honestly, I, e- the, the Lynyrd Skynyrd thing is really especially apt to me because, m- maybe we’ll end up discussing this one day, but, like, th- that was a band who was adjacent to and often wrongfully associated with, like, racism. they were not in f**king Antifa, but they were also like, “Nah, that ain’t it.”

Kyle: Okay, do you wanna start a band that is Antifa Skynyrd though? Because I would be very into that

Cliff: Yes. In some sense, is that not what you and I are doing every day of our lives?

Kyle: We are the, we are the Bo and Luke Duke

Cliff: that, that’s same Well, I don’t know too much of who I am, but I’m definitely not that.” Like, man, that, that energy has some really interesting places in music and I think again, that’s a, a cool and apt connection to just people who are spiritually complementary to this way of making art and trying to be self-expressive in a way that is both genuine and positive as much as possible.

The, the goal of this is not to be a role model for women as far as I know, but there’s no reason it can’t be that way, and there’s no reason you can’t borrow confidence and curiosity about yourself and your body and everything else that I, that I think this record can bring up for you if you let it.

And I-

Kyle: it– not just for women, it was for all people. One of my favorite Twigs stories is they interviewed T-Pain for something, and he talked about being in a rut in the music industry, and he said, “Twigs actually changed my whole perspective on the music industry. She made me proud of myself again the way she was talking to me.

I told her I wanted to do some stuff like videos and putting out some songs, but I was like, ‘I can’t.’ And she was like, ‘Why?’ I was like, ‘You know, the label and stuff like that.’ She was like, ‘Why? Do they control you? How are they controlling you? What, are they gonna sue you? ‘Cause that’s their money too.’ She opened my eyes.

I felt like I was brainwashed and she came and reset me. Like, why am I not putting out songs? Why am I not doing this? ‘Cause every time I see her there’s a new video, a new song. I’m like, ‘Your label’s okay with that?’ And she’s like, ‘I don’t give a f**k about that.’ It changed my life, you know, the way she looked at things.

And I tell her every time I talk to her, she changed my life. She is amazing.” And look at T-Pain now

Cliff: Two other quotes from her I think help drive that home, and then I wanna make sure we touch on any, any next steps from here. Uh, I have lots of ideas and none of them at the same time, which was fun.

Kyle: Kinda same,

Yeah.

Cliff: but kind of extending out the energy from that T-Pain interaction. One of the things she said that, that also hopefully connects to some of the things I’ve been trying to express so far.

She said, quote, “Weird things can be sexy. Vulnerability is the strongest state to be in. How boring would it be if we were constantly dominant or constantly submissive?” Once again, okay, I f**k with that. What you just said, 1,000%.

Kyle: Yeah, man

Cliff: Not, not only that weird can be sexy, like, yes. For sure, dude.

Not only is that cool and true, but also vulnerability is that state that you want to be in where the weirdness is okay. I agree that it’s the strongest state to be in when you are vulnerable. And, like, that’s already a whole lot. But then this idea of, like, how boring would it be if I was constantly dominant or constantly submissive?

I don’t know. Everybody’s probably got their yin and yang. Me and Kyle are yin and yang in many senses in this way. Myself and my life partner are yin and yang in this sense in many ways. But I think the secret weapon of the whole thing is, and I think you would agree with this directly, Kyle, even if I am one of these normally, but I know how to be the other.

Kyle: Oh, yeah.

Cliff: that’s… Man, like, that’s how you build intimacy through vulnerability with another human being, is like, yeah, other people know me as this, but you get to know me as this, and this only comes out in the situations where it’s, yeah, safe obviously. But after a while, the personality that you only share in an intimate setting or with people really close to you, after a while, once again, like, that becomes your weird, sexy thing.

dude, that’s, that’s the strangest parts about you, and I love you. And I’m vulnerable because I don’t mind dragging this out into the light now when I’m around

Kyle: You turn the lights on it

Cliff: Exactly. now we got the lights on, and we can do whatever weird s**t it is that we wanna do consensually together ’cause it doesn’t feel weird anymore.

Like, I’m– We’re just gonna look straight into each other’s eyes, like, literally and metaphorically. And man, that’s cool. Like, that, that frees me up maybe even more than a prince or somebody who at times feel intimidatingly sexual all the time. And, like, this is a reminder of actually you’re sort of a generic mess, and that’s cool about you and like dig into that.

The other thing she says, which I, I think maps really well to how I’m able to appreciate whatever level of seriousness she has about music. In a separate setting, she says, ” That is why music matters to me, because you can explain things in like…” Okay, this is a whole quote. She, she sort of is using millennial speak, so follow me.

Okay. She says, “And that’s why music matters to me, because you can explain things in, like, a rise of something, or whether that’s clarinets or violins or something that’s beautifully programmed or even just, like, space. Even just a certain beat and then just space. This transcends language. It’s a universal emotional activation that it doesn’t matter where you’re from, you get what someone’s explaining to you, and that’s why music matters to me.”

Well, damn, I f**k with this too.

Kyle: Wow

Cliff: Yeah, the idea that there is a universal emotional activation that allows me to understand what you’re saying and explaining to me. we’ve found a thousand ways to describe the cosmic magic of music, and that’s a pretty good one that should be added to the portfolio.

Kyle: Man, that’s really beautiful. And to be so young in the grand scheme of things, our age, but now almost 20 years of making music full-time, that she’s got a pretty good handle on how to… it’s one thing to have those ideas and to know that those things are true, but to be able to execute them

in a way that resonates with people is, like, pretty spectacular

Where do you go from here?

Cliff: So I can take the first easy route and I can kind of use that quote. So that whole thing of like I am able to communicate the universal language of music to other people at scale, like in large crowds, in albums, in visual media. Like I can do all of it and I can command excellence in it. So we’ve mentioned these a few times, but, uh, like Björk is an immediate place to go to energetically here in all of her many prolific projects throughout the years.

Like almost all of them fit the vibe of sort of what’s being done here energetically. Like I will explode who I am out into public, uh, and will do so with such precision that you, you can accept or deny me, but like this is me. and a ton of Björk’s projects come to mind for sure. But then I also think you mentioned Rosalía earlier.

That was like the immediate… when I started thinking, “Okay, I can go, I can go back in time a little bit to this record, but what would a 2026 version of this be?” It’s that. It’s exactly that album where it’s like, in order to express myself artistically, I will be singing in other languages that I must now learn.

And like not just that that project exists, but that there is a human being on earth who committed themselves to that level of thing, and then it squeaked through the wall and became a massive thing that other people came to appreciate. that was a place my brain immediately went because honestly, I’m still surprised that something so artistic and complex got so much notoriety in the last year.

and I’m very stoked for it. So, I’m hopeful that to your point, maybe we can continue to find new versions of big cu- cultural moments, like that album that would hit. but it continues to be pretty rare to me. Uh, and so I appreciate it when it’s there. on kind of like moving down the totem pole of like complete artistic vision into just like slightly more specific vibes but that get done with precision.

You know, speaking of things that are not my vibe, but the Lily Allen record and her performances this year are in the vein of this. There’s a, a whole bunch of internet commentary about like, “I finally got to see Lily Allen and she only played for the length of her record,” and just extremely British s**t, man.

She’s like, “Yeah, that is because that is how long my record is, and I told you I would be playing my record.” and like I, y- I just, I, I love how European that is in general. But again, the, the commitment to the specific artistic expression, and in her case, that’s a vibe I don’t wanna feel, but it’s very like, “T- this is what a terrible breakup feels like.

Here it is. Sit inside of it and squirm for 40 minutes,” and then on an even lighter level that to me doesn’t carry that level of s- seriousness or commitment to a specific emotional bit, but has the expressiveness, that once again reminded me of Joanna Newsom, the harpist

Kyle: Oh yeah

Cliff: like, who can paint worlds with a few strings and her voice.

but just the, precision of I only have these two instruments at my disposal, so here is what I’ll do with them, and they will work in perfect harmony. Like hopefully I’m sort of visually in those different artists I mentioned there. Like I’m cutting across a, depth or a concentration of artistry is different across each of them.

But I think that that’s helpful to discern because like that, that way you can match up with kinda how you’re feeling. and in that sense, you know, this record sits for me closer to the Homogenic side of things than it would a Joanna Newsom side of things. Like I think from here on out, if I’m putting on this record to your comment about like resetting stuff, like I have a time and a place where I listen to that Björk record and other Björk albums a lot now.

Like I think this record’s gonna end up finding a, a place, maybe even a literal place in my life. And if not, maybe a time of year where I want to deploy it

Kyle: That’s so rad

Cliff: If it helps, a very small smattering of other people that kind of popped up for me vibe-wise. I think it’s like less of an academic exercise at that, at this point and more just like, here are some folks that it sounds like that. But like we mentioned earlier, like, so SZA and like “SOS”

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: to me very very similar to this for all the reasons I mentioned before, but like that one gets deployed as well.

Um, that one puts

Kyle: Yeah, you really like that record a lot. Yeah. That’s cool

Cliff: another one that’s sort of spiritually similar, uh, but has a, a different place in my life would be Channel Orange, which we’ve talked about plenty. But like there’s a lot of Frank Ocean overlap here.

Kyle: This record’s more like “Blonde,” but yeah, there’s definitely a Frank. I– Did I remember reading that she has a pet that she named Solo, or am I thinking of somebody else? there’s definitely a spiritual connection to Frank Ocean in there.

Cliff: And then a few other pretty quick and easy ones, but just, um, first of all we sort of mentioned earlier the sort of ability to switch in and out of sexuality and sensualness in general. If you take that a little bit more on the like let’s take 80% Twigs and maybe 20% Tim Robinson and we can get Doja Cat who is occasionally what

Kyle: I love Doja Cat

Cliff: Yeah, me too.

Kyle: so much. So mu- just even if she never made music, Doja Cat on TikTok is

incredible

Cliff: But

Kyle: That new song with Latto is great,

Cliff: Totally. To- Well, so that’s sort of the thing I mean. It’s like, man, as an artist, she’s someone who’s like, “Oh no, I can do the really good stuff if I want to. I just may not feel like it today.” Like, okay.

Kyle: The, the– It was so clear with the video that was like, “Okay, I’m sick of you guys talking about me like chutting myself up or whatever. Like, I’m hot, bro. I’m, I’m hot and I can also rap. And so, any other stupid incel s**t that you guys have to say, could you please just stop for a minute ’cause I’m great?”

Cliff: Yep. Um, otherwise, just folks who are in the similar ecosystem to me Summer Walker’s stuff I’ve enjoyed a lot and sort of spiritually reminds me of this. You know, always gotta promote somebody from Atlanta if we can. and then, but then also, like, things that should be fairly obvious from here.

Doechii, Kay Bush, Caroline Polachek there’s a lot of stuff that’s just right really close around here. but that, at least for me, like I would hit my concentration of that sort of music really soon if I tried to listen to too many of those records at one time. Um, but nevertheless, good and important artists.

And Tems is another one, I think. somebody just like really pushing

Kyle: like T-E-M-S of Nigeria? Yeah, yeah

Cliff: Yeah. In, in t- taking what should ostensibly be a pretty simple genre or approach or whatever and bringing in one just like really well done angle on it that other folks haven’t done before. but all those things being said, you know, that’s, that’s sort of my full list here.

A lot of times listening to these motivate us to go out and listen to other ones. This is one of the few that a little bit like Odetta record in a, in the sense that I get to the end and I just kinda go, “I think I’m just gonna be quiet for a minute

Kyle: Yeah.

Cliff: and, and let it simmer and let that whole thing reverberate for a bit.”

Kyle: That’s real. Or like go to Willie’s Roadhouse on SiriusXM, just like a totally, totally, totally different thing that I c- I can in fact put on quietly in the background and not, not think about, not be in my body for a minute.

Cliff: the DirecTV rock music station. Yeah.

Kyle: Whatever, whatever music choice channel is on where I’m picking up my hot wings with the little logo bouncing around like a DVD logo on the TV.

Cliff: Never

made it as a wise man.

Kyle: Oh my God. Didn’t, uh, speaking of Doja Cat, did– Was it her that she did the Cheetos ad with Nickelback?

Did I hallucinate that? Did I Mandela effect that entirely? Hold on. That’s a thing,

right?

Cliff: sentence.

Kyle: Nickelback, Doja Cat. Is that a thing? Hmm. Nickelback Cheetos ad. Megan Thee Stallion

Cliff: Yeah. Okay.

Kyle: Did a Flamin’ Hot Dill Pickle Cheetos ad

Cliff: All right, that maps

Kyle: Wow, what, What a challenge for my last three remaining brain cells that was Nickelback just completely threw me off.

Cliff: I’m sorry about that

Kyle: I’m a, kind of a defender. Oh, that’s fine okay. For me, I would start with the close orbit bit and then move outward

I was really fascinated with the time and place of like weird, sort of experimental, sort of almost industrial at times, extremely unique, like alternative, alternative

Cliff: Yeah

Kyle: female artists. So like I think Arca is amazing.

Cliff: Yeah

Kyle: I think SOPHIE was really singular. I continue to this day to love that Vince Staples quote where he was like, “SOPHIE was always on some gangsta s**t in the studio.”

And like if you started to get too emotional rapping over her beats, she’d be like in a full leather outfit making beats and not talking to anybody, and you’d go in the booth and you’d start rapping, and if it got too emotional, she would turn the whole s**t off and leave the studio until you got it together and got back on some gangsta s**t.

And just like Vince Staples and SOPHIE working together is just delightful. But there, there is that uniquely starting in the 2010s phenomenon of rap and weird stuff coming together, like rap getting more experimental as a genre. You, you alluded to cloud rap, but I love Twigs’ relationship with rap overtly and abstractly.

it’s well documented at this point on the podcast that, that is, if it’s not my favorite kind of music, it’s one of them. but like she just put out a song a couple of weeks ago with Yachty, and it’s one of the more interesting Yachty performances I’ve ever seen, and then they had this cool video that’s shot between Atlanta and London, and it kinda reminded me of the J.Lo and Ja Rule “I’m Real” video in the way they’re just kind of like out on the streets together, but it’s like a cool A24 almost version of that, and it’s a great song.

and it’s just like, wow, she can kinda do anything ’cause she’s so steezy in that, and she’s got on like cool big sunglasses. So it doesn’t have to be like ballet, classical music Twigs. She can do is the best word of the episode. Yes,

Cliff: exactly

Kyle: very steezy. She can be cool in so many different ways. She can deploy her coolness in lots of ways.

And when you watch some of this early stuff with her, she’s not the type of person that would strike me as confident, but she’s obviously extraordinarily confident to make some of the risky decisions that she does. But maybe it’s just the Johnny Cash, like, “This is what I know,” “why would it be any other way but this?

This is me.” she’s worked with Young Lean. She did that interview with Carti. But my favorite hip hop Twigs moment is she directed the video for a song she was in with A$AP Rocky called “F**k Sleep,” and it’s a sick video, and it’s from “Testing,” which is like, Rocky has always been kind of flirting with the high art, whatever experimental type of stuff, but “Testing” was– he really went gangbusters with textural, structurally experimental type of stuff. And so “F**k Sleep” is a tight song, and it’s a very cool video, and she’s very steezy in that in a different way. Rocky is– I don’t, I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a male Twigs. He’s not nearly that experimental, but he brings a flavor to rap, especially in his insane videos. A$AP Rocky, for my money, has had the best music videos of the past 10, 15 years, for sure.

So that’s a really cool collaboration that I like a lot.

Cliff: Thank you. Not to throw you off, but this is making me feel better for bringing him up earlier. This is sort of what I meant. Yeah, he’s, he’s not the full 100% pure artist all the time, but like he was trying some

Kyle: He doesn’t get enough credit for how arty he is. Yeah, yeah. And like really, really worldly he is in his reference points and original ideas and stuff. a couple of the like concentric circle close artists, close or otherwise artists. There– I’m fascinated by this horse girl artist that she like wears the horse prosthetics and does kind of hyperpop.

I’m still trying to find the center of what’s– or find what’s at the center of that, but I love that it exists. I mean, Charli XCX here coming out with music, fashion, and film, like yet another era. They’re so different as artists, but they’re always going for it and staying true to themselves. I would put Twigs and Charli in that same cat– Like I just, I f**king love Charli XCX.

there are artists like Cobrah, Tommy Genesis, Slayyyter that are all doing different versions of like it’s gonna be something different every time. I think Chelsea Wolfe is somebody you could bring up is like sonically very different, but I mean, imagine like Chelsea Wolfe and FKA Twigs playing an opera house bill together.

I would, I would, pay multiple hundreds of dollars

Cliff: Your description of seeing Twigs at Terminal West was exactly my experience seeing her at Terminal

Kyle: Yeah,

yeah. yeah.

Cliff: the people were slightly less horny and sexy. But otherwise, exactly the same

Kyle: Yeah, a little more alienated vibe in the room

that evening. Yeah, like, uh, people stuck in a coal mine together. Hushed whispers.

Uh, but both artists that I would describe as, like, profound, with incredible voices that you wanna be quiet to hear. I mean, I thought a lot about film scores. I brought up the “Hacks and Cloak” earlier, but I was thinking about, like, the “Obsession” film score or the, Backrooms” score and some of the synthier weird stuff and how streaming has given scores kind of a new cachet.

Mandy” being another one. There’s all kinds of them out there. Like, if you don’t wanna listen to more albums, you could go listen to non-classical, non-Hans Zimmer, more synth-oriented scores, of which there have been a ton over the past 20 years. That could be a cool direction to go. I also thought about Hiro Murai after watching a bunch of her videos.

He directed one of her videos. In fact, his first music thing he directed after “This Is America” was her video for “Sad Day.” So watching Hiro Murai shows like, obviously “Atlanta,” but also “Widow’s Bay” being the most recent one, could give you a bit of the vibe of really going for it art-wise. there was something about that new James Blake record.

Like, James Blake just kinda kept coming up as an artist sonically. I don’t think there’s a lot that relates to them otherwise other than, like, really going for their own thing and being vocal about their vulnerabilities. Like, his stuff in his love life with his partner, but also his stuff as, like, an artist in the music business and fighting for freedom and autonomy, just, like, really recognizing themselves as a voice and trying to be that for other people.

I saw them as related in that way. And then there’s all that other stuff like Nicolas Jaar and experimental and ambient. Sun Araw” is not in the vein of… But I was like, I just want somebody to curate a bunch of cool stuff for an art gallery like Nicolas Jaar, Marina Abramović, you know?

Twigs just makes me wanna go to an art gallery and just experience art in a- in all of its– be in a physical space and just watching beauty happen. which I guess kinda goes back to Charlie with music, fashion, and film. Like, I, I just– listening to Twigs makes me wanna be where it’s at, you know, be in the room where it’s happening to not only experience beauty myself in my own body, but to experience other people experiencing that beauty, which I guess I kinda did at Terminal West, but I wasn’t obviously not prepared for it that evening. Older w- older, hopefully wiser me is more prepared for it now.

Cliff: I feel confident that you are I think one good way to leave this, I might tee you up for a quote that I think you mentioned to me, but the If I’m gonna embrace the curiosity that this record artfully expresses and invites me into, I guess, I think one cool way to be curious about it is Kind of regardless of what comes next, whatever Twigs is doing will be interesting. And it seems like you know, if we’re using our logic here, if she was a thing of excellence as a dancer and then she let us know, “Hey, inside of me there are at least two wolves. Surprise.” and then, and now she’s become this artist in that amount of time, it seems just as likely, is, is there a third wolf in here?

Is the largesse and approach to art gonna result in something different coming from somebody who was capable of so much to begin with and then, slowly refined more and more, and now plugging both of those things together? so many of the artists that we talk about are either dead ends in themselves ’cause they, ’cause they dead, or because, you know, uh, because it immediately points you in another direction and you’re otherwise entertained.

But, like, I, I think there’s maybe something interesting not only generically but specifically about Twigs and where she might go from here.

Kyle: Yeah, there’s a definite sense of watch this space. She– The third wolf for sure is acting.

Cliff: Mm.

Oh yeah, that’s right. she was in…

a movie with Anne Hathaway.

Kyle: Sh- Yes. She was in “The Crow,” a TV version of “The Crow” with Bill Skarsgård, and now earlier this year was in “Mother Mary” with Anne Hathaway. And they asked her at a talk back for that film about some of her favorite artists, and she described the through line of those artists being world builders, and she mentioned David Bowie, she mentioned Kate Bush, like you invoked.

And she said, you know, you look back through their whole career and you think, “Wow, they almost invented a feeling that had never been described before.” And I think so much of what we’ve talked about has been her doing kind of exactly that on this record. And her most recent record, “Euxua,” uh, came from her time shooting “The Crow” and being back out going to UK clubs, being out all night, like in her physical body in a physical space.

and I also learned, in one of the write-ups talking about those things, like there’s tons of other stuff that she’s done. Th- this interviewer said, “In our interview alone, I learned that she did voice work for a cat commercial, worked as a wedding singer, and even starred on an English TV program as a kid akin to the ‘Mickey Mouse Club.'”

But they said, “It’s up to Twigs when she shares those facets of her personality with the world. For now, acting is finally front and center.” but you were alluding to this, the quote that I shared with you that I thought was really interesting to me is she said, “One day I’d love to do something where I can just leave it all on the stage, as we say, push my different crafts to their maximum for an incredible project.”

She said, “To do that, I’ll probably have to make my own.” And my thought to you was, “Well, man, I certainly hope she does.”