Seeing FKA Twigs in the flesh is – on one level, at least – a terrible disappointment. This much-hyped artist doesn't actually have eyes the size of grapefruits, a neck like a giraffe, a flower stamen growing out of her pubis, or limbs like spillages of crude oil; her face is not a canvas full of paint. Since the end of 2012, over the course of a series of four-track EPs with videos, the artist Formerly Known As Twigs (there was already another Twigs, apparently) introduced herself as less a new girl singer than a series of fascinating visual and auditory manipulations; a work of art.
Pop music has always fed the eyes as well as the ears. Recently, though, music-lovers have been feasting in a way that significantly shifts the visual banquet of pop from its old haunts: album sleeve art, the dressing-up box, or the song-with-short-film form that MTV popularised at its inception in the early 80s. Although you can always cite Madonna in these discussions, lately Beyoncé's visual album, Lana Del Rey's 360-degree cinematic retro aesthetic, and Lady Gaga have driven home exactly how much more primarily visual pop is now, in the internet age. On her videos, FKA Twigs's eye-popping looks have taken in CGI nudity, a young Sade being strangled, and most recently, in the video for Two Weeks she rocks a Hindu goddess look while making reference to Aaliyah's role as a vampire in the 2002 horror film, Queen of the Damned. A great deal of the movement in her videos plays consciously on the repetition of gifs.
Tonight, though, in what is probably FKA Twigs's 10th or so gig ever, to the largest crowd she has ever played, the young Gloucestershire-born woman onstage is revealed as merely human. She is a preternaturally lithe specimen, adorned with her signature gold septum ring and chunky earrings. Between songs, she is giggly and nervous. Perhaps, once her debut album – LP1, due out in August – is successful, FKA Twigs will be able to afford a few holograms, or Björk's set designer. But for now, in London's Institute Of Contemporary Arts, we are in the relatively conventional presence of a singer, three backing musicians (triggering virtually everything on drum pads) and a lot of smoke and back lighting.
At first, we can't see anything at all. There are disembodied beats and a long, tantalising gap before Twigs' whispers finally begin Weak Spot. She dances in shadow, her three band members occasionally revealed in brief flashes of light. As the set gathers pace, more light is allowed in, but the mood remains dusky and intimate, like FKA Twigs's unapologetically sexual music. "When I trust you we can do it with the lights on," she breathes on the chorus to Lights On, a monster tune, in this refracted context. "My thighs are apart for when you're ready to breathe in," she declares on another, the ecstatically filthy Two Weeks.
FKA Twigs instantly became one of the most talked-about new artists around not least because she exuded the obligatory air of mystery now synonymous with being a meme in the over-sharing age, but also because the former dancer's music is so often explicitly about physical contact. It also takes generously from the more penumbral end of the bedroom spectrum. On EP1, FKA Twigs's music started off as a breathy digital take on trip-hop. In the company of various producers – like Kanye collaborator Arca, for her EP2 – it has evolved gradually into sultry, minimal post-R&B. Tonight, she has arrived at a sound that suggests a contemporary Aaliyah, as remixed by the xx or the Weeknd, then run through a mangle with some forgotten small change. It is, mostly, mesmerising – a kind of rolling, non-linear wash of butterfly sighs and fluttery judders and cooed loops. Water Me has beats that sound like creaking doors. "He won't make love to me now," she sings. She is "so small", apparently. "I told him, water me," she breathes. The song ends with devastating abruptness.
Of the songs not already loose on the internet, Pendulum (woodpecker beats, more soulful bent, false ending) provides a preview of the skeletal lushness of FKA Twigs' forthcoming album. There are moments when she sounds more like Kate Bush or Liz Fraser than Aaliyah, providing tiny variations in tone. Much of the set list is faintly familiar, in one form or another from YouTube, re-enacted here as a slow dance with lots of goddessy arm-snaking. Could more be going on? Well, yes. But not a lot happens at the Weeknd's shows either: this is full immersion in a compelling, fully realised aesthetic.
