Courtesy of Complex.

Sex is weird. It is full of awkwardness, anticipation, and – sometimes – ecstasy. The first full song on FKA twigs‰’ LP1 establishes all of these things and more. 

It builds gradually, from bizarre background patterns of percussion to whiny, abrasive synths that have co-producer Arca‰’s fingerprints all over them. These earliest sounds create almost immediately an environment of estrangement and arousal, but are at once tangled in with a softness and echoing quality to the groove. The song knows how to tease, knows how to disrupt. The ethereal is interrupted by episodes of oddity, of convulsion that are representative of the dancing style for which twigs originally became famous.

When the chorus comes in, it comes in with the drop of a stand-up bass; sensual, groovy, and soft-core. Over the course of the song‰’s four-and-a-half minutes, the song adds and adds to the cacophony of noises with saxophone, choral samples, and walls of crashing noise. The chaotic nature shows some of Arca‰’s finest and most refined work. 

On top of this, these production elements are threaded with a vocal performance that instantly displays twigs‰’ range and timbre. Twigs‰’ voice is a powerhouse, using fluttering falsettos that rival Prince and an eccentricity reaching above even the best of Kate Bush‰’s work, it bulges with many styles and yet is nothing if not undeniably unique.

“Lights On‰” does a lot to represent to represent LP1 as a whole. It is here, in the anticipatory moments, that twigs is at her strongest, at her best in terms of motion, texture, and double entendre. The song is not just about sex. The lights are the lights of the stage as much as they are the lights of a bedroom. LP1 is about sexuality, yes, but more than that it is about twigs‰’ relationship to her audience, her shyness, her difficulty with exhibitionism: “I shy away in my mind / In hopes that I could share this place with you.‰” The first lines of her breakthrough album affirm her artistic position, while all at once highlighting the sensuality and attraction of that which exists in the darkness.