FKA Twigs Extends Her Reign as the Queen of Music Videos With This Haunting Short Film
Still via YouTube
Last week FKA Twigs impressed again with her innovative commercial for Google Glass. Today, she’s added to her growing collection of masterful videos with a haunting new one for the aptly titled song “Video Girl,” off her debut album LP1. It would probably be more accurate, in fact, to describe this wonderful piece of work as a short film.
Directed by Khalil Joseph, the black-and-white short opens to the operatic strains of “Preface,” the first track on Twigs’ album. Twigs, entranced, witnesses an inmate (a lover, perhaps?) die by lethal injection. Pictures of Twigs line the wall in the background. This jarring opening cuts to even darker imagery as the song “Video Girl” begins: Twigs envisions the injection room as her own personal stage, twitching and convulsing to the song’s beat. At one particularly eerie moment, we see her straddle the inmate’s corpse and sing into a microphone that hangs from the ceiling. The musician Travis Scott—who shares a similar visual aesthetic—also makes a bloody appearance in what is one of the most disturbing and breathtaking videos I’ve seen this year.
Twigs could have an even bigger day when the winner for the coveted Mercury Award, given to the year’s best British album, is announced later today. She’s been considered the favorite to win after her nomination last month.