"Hey, I made you a mixtape," FKA Twigs whispers at the start of her latest and funkiest release.

Whilst her previous works are defined by dramatic quiet-loud dynamics, huge crescendos and stacks of negative space, CAPRISONGS is filled to the brim with big beats and even bigger basslines. Drum machines rip their way across its 48 minute runtime, whereas the drums on 2019's MAGDALENE (Twigs epic last album) often only kicked in midway through each track and sounded more like scraping and crunching metal than traditional drum hits.

That's not to say that Twigs has lost her experimental touch though; her production and vocals are still plenty odd. Instead of a typical drum break, the beat on 'ride the dragon' dissolves into layers of mediaeval-sounding vocals and screaming synths, before snapping right back into the hip-hop groove. And 'meta angel' pairs gentle piano with garishly extreme autotune.

But it's the songs' sheer catchiness that sets this mixtape apart from this year's other releases. Every time I listen to 'oh my love', I imagine going to a Twigs concert, hearing her rap "everybody knows that I want your love," and being part of a huge crowd screaming back "why you playing, baby boy, what's up?" The reggaeton-tinged Shygirl collab 'papi bones' is begging to be played on a car's super loud sound system, and the trippy melancholy of 'tears in the club' really lives up to its name. But it's the Daniel Caesar collab 'careless' that's got to be this project's choice-cut. With softly-hummed hooks, crunchy lo-fi drums, and the repeated promise that "you can be careless with me," it's as warm and intimate as a lovely lie-in with a partner.

I should mention as well that, in the grand hip-hop tradition, this mixtape is interspersed with skits. Not just between tracks but midway through them as well, in the form of deep conversational snippets presumably recorded in semi-secrecy on Twigs' phone at a drinks/smoke sesh. Memorable lines from these DMCs include "THIS 👏 IS 👏 THE 👏 YEAR 👏 of greatness 👏 growth 👏 and being free 👏 I'm telling you!" and "I'm not the rockstar's girlfriend, I'm the rockstar girlfriend."

Including these candid jokes and bits of advice is a god-tier flourish which fills the whole mixtape with the warmth of genuine friendship and the life-affirming vibes of a good sesh. There are also more deliberately recorded skits in there, with the second-to-last track built entirely around an astrology reading ("How delightful! You were born on a new moon!") apparently given by Twigs' perfumer Christi Meshell.

Twigs herself is almost entirely absent from that track, and the whole mixtape is smeared with so many sets of fingerprints it's tricky to ascribe authorship solely to FKA Twigs, AKA Tahliah Barnett. Aside from the 8 big guest appearances, there are 24 credited producers (as in beat-makers; that 24 doesn't include the 9 people credited for technical roles like engineering, mixing and mastering) who worked in recording studios across the UK, the US and Jamaica. Twigs has said she has "more collaborations and features on this album than I ever had before," and (due to the pandemic) she only met many of these collaborators over facetime, with everything done "via the internet."

It's not unusual for a pop album to be passed around many different producers, bouncing from studio to hard-drive to studio like a pinball, but FKA Twigs’ releases are unusually arty and focused considering their long receipts of production credits. Compare this to FKA Twigs' fellow art-pop legend (and Medieval Thots bandmate) Grimes, who self-produced her first four albums in their entirety.

Of course it's not a sin to work with producers, and Grimes herself considers Twigs to be "the best in the game," but this hyper-collaborative approach does make it hard to know who contributed what to the instrumentals: you can't geek out over musical details in the context of their authors the way you can with say Sophie's synth sounds or Johnny Marr's guitar playing. And if you try combing through Twigs' production credits, it can be hard to know what to do with the few names that really jump out. It’s like ‘wtf Skrillex did some of the drums on MAGDALENE?!”

Having said all that, I'm pretty sure a lot of the piano on CAPRISONGS is played by Twigs herself (at least I like to think so). And for the record, the lion's share of CAPRISONGS' production was supposedly handled by El Guincho, who is best known for producing Rosalia's album El Mal Querer alongside her collabs with Travis Scott and Billie Eilish.

In film criticism, auteur theory is used to boil down the authorship of a whole film from the dozens or hundreds of names in the credits down to just the director. And whilst that can be extremely reductive and problematic, it can also be really useful to consider a massively collaborative film project as an entry in one individual filmography: it provides the film with points of comparison and a lineage in the director's other films. Likewise Rosalia's El Mal Querer isn't a particularly interesting companion to CAPRISONGS, whereas MAGDALENE is enlightening. The jump from Twigs singing about 'sacred geometries', 'fruit bowls of pain' and 'intentions to cleanse you' on her last album, to rapping 'Honda! Rizla! Baby!' on her new mixtape more or less sums up the entire project. It's about a writer who expresses pain so poetically choosing instead to say something fun and catchy.

A lot of reviews of this album in the British press contextualise it by quoting Twigs' interview on Louis Theroux's podcast. But there's a moment in a rival podcast, in an interview with a different writer of a different generation in a different field, that I think really explains the spirit of CAPRISONGS. In the first Zadie Smith episode of Adam Buxton's Podcast, she answers the question “What always lifts your spirits?” by saying, “Hip-hop just makes me happy. If I’m exercising it makes me exercise, if it’s old 90s hip-hop it fills me with warm feelings and nostalgia. I’m very much a sucker for beats. People like Bobby Shmurda who is now unfortunately in jail for shmurder [...] There’s a song called Panda, the chorus goes Panda, Panda, Panda, Panda, which is literally about two different kinds of car, and when you have both of them together they look like a panda. My brothers frown on this kind of party hip hop, but the song is irresistible.”

That’s what FKA Twigs’ new mixtape reminds me of most. Five stars!

By Matt Purbrick

Originally written in March 2022 for The Gryphon