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[Liam.k.]

'Cellophane' has been named song of the year by Slant Magazine! 'Sad Day' is #5 and Magdalene is #2, second to Lana Del Rey.

2. FKA twigs, Magdalene
A distinct feminine energy pulses through FKA twigs’s shimmering sophomore effort, Magdalene. Coming off the back of a major public breakup with actor Robert Pattinson and a period of ill-health which left her creatively and physically depleted, twigs made it her mission—both in the writing of this follow-up to 2014’s LP1 and in the extraordinary wushu and pole training she undertook for her Magdalene tour—to embrace her pain. There’s little sense on Magdalene that twigs believes there’s an ideal way to be; all she can do is learn how to accept her own contradictions as a necessary part of growth. The album is a knotty meditation on the process of separating self-perception from public perception, and of twigs’s reclamation of her body and work as hers and hers alone. Richmond

1. FKA twigs, “Cellophane”
It’s no mean feat for an artist to create something that requires enormous strength and yet, to their audience, seems so fragile that it could shatter at any moment. On “Cellophane,” the lead single from her sophomore effort, Magdalene, FKA twigs achieves precisely that. “Didn’t I do it for you?” she asks softly over a sparse piano line, seeming to teeter on an emotional knife’s edge. When she jumps an octave, the effect is heightened even further; her voice is still pure and plaintive, but there’s defiance there too. It’s this tension between pain and power that makes the song’s accompanying video so arresting, and so devastating. As twigs performs a pole dance with near-divine grace, the immense physicality required to master the art becomes invisible, leaving behind only soft lines and fluid movement. Against the backdrop of a woman so clearly self-possessed in her power, the question “Didn’t I do it for you” suddenly seems all the more pointed. As if from spider silk, she spins her pain into a method of healing. Richmond

5. FKA twigs, “Sad Day”
Throughout her second album, Magdalene, FKA twigs calls upon religious references to subvert ideas of her own power. A lyric like “I lie naked and pure with intentions to cleanse you and take you,” from the transcendent “Sad Day,” suggests both submission and dominance; the act of cleansing recalls Mary Magdalene washing Jesus’s feet, yet the phrase “take you” suggests that the object of her affections has no choice but to submit to her. Another often misrepresented biblical figure, Eve, comes to mind when twigs invites her lover to “taste the fruit of me” on the same song, but it’s not an act of temptation, it’s a plea. Richmond

Magdalene is #2 on Pitchfork too (second to Lana again) and #1 on PopMatters and Time.

Madame X is my favourite album of 2019 but Magdalene is a very close second - didn't ever expect myself to like this album at all tbh, completely took me by surprise but I'm so pleased I gave it a chance.