Later, twigs moves through vignettes that show her as a sex doll, seductress, pregnant, in the club with her girls, being watched by a man as she dances solo to trembling down a runway with a crew of voguers. The film accompanying M3LL155X opens on the wrinkled, smiling face of restaurateur and creative icon Michèle Lamy, who is tattooed, older and unbothered, and the muse and partner to fashion designer Rick Owens. What lyrics might not make explicit, her videos and movement do: illuminating the multifarious ways in which a woman - a black woman - understands and owns her body, sexuality and creativity. Voguing, like the ballroom culture that birthed the dance style, has been a way for gay men and queer people of colour to aggressively reclaim their bodies, cycling back into twigs' ideas about rebirth. In the video for "Figure 8", a song about life and birth, twigs uses a prosthesis to appear pregnant, stepping and spinning while clutching her belly. The title of the track, produced with Beyonce's Beyoncé ace Boots, is derived from the detailed handwork voguers use to frame their faces as they dance, as twigs explained i n an interview with Complex. That's the rub behind a seemingly submissive song like "I'm Your Doll", an angsty love song written by her pre-woke teenage self that twigs repurposes for adulthood."I just want you to love you," she implores, as a reminder, on the garage-meets- gagging dancefloor missive "Glass & Patron." M3LL155X - like Sasha Fierce or Zadie Smith - isn't interested in vulnerability. Over modular synth patches and a fluid wheeze of artificial strings on "In Time", she tests her brawniest delivery yet: "Every day, every day, you be testing my sane, you've got a goddamned nerve." When there are vocal effects, they're sinister instead of sweet, as if she's haunted by her own thoughts. The opening track "Figure 8" rumbles, shudders, whirrs and clicks like most of LP1, but her voice is clearer than ever. Instead of obfuscating her soft voice with layers of effects or singing in that cartoonishly frail and breathy falsetto, twigs prowls confidently over M3LL155X. M3LL155X (pronounced 'Melissa') builds on her previous work, exploring ideas of dominance and submission and drilling down almost completely into the self. As a creative package the EP is unimpeachable a high-concept, intellectually curious project that's evocative, accessible and transgressive enough to satisfy the competing demands of a newly broadened fanbase and her existing audience of Tumblr-educated aesthetes. She develops these ideas further on M3LL155X, a five-song EP accompanied by a 16-minute music video/film that dropped last week, just over a year after the release of twigs' high profile debut, LP1.
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