Then she’s slowly sliding down the wall again in 'Ultraviolet', beginning the song with a clutch of highly pitched lines perforated by an icy quiver. On 'Water Me' she's coated in a thin layer of FX, adding another alien layer to a music that already sounds positively extra-terrestrial. Something striking about twigs' delivery is her desire to switch between the real and the unreal, allowing her to open up a distance with her audience whenever she chooses. But twigs is the star here, her voice rising and falling in unexpected places, full of unique color, sometimes pulling you in close even if the place she's in doesn’t feel like somewhere you necessarily want to be. At times the most striking element is the oppressive bass that swells up, bearing such weight it resembles someone dragging a gigantic rock through the desert. 'Water Me' is built around a playful vocal sample that recalls Laurie Anderson's 'O Superman'. So on 'How's That' we get down-tuned slabs of noise and a sound that resembles a manic ping-pong ball layered under twigs' emoting. It's something twigs and Arca understand implicitly, unlike the small legion of pallid genre clones that followed the Bristol triumvirate of Massive Attack, Portishead, and Tricky. Making disparate elements work together was a key tenet of trip-hop, where a spacey quality was given room to flow amid beats that were more commonly associated with tightly wound hip-hop tracks. Still, the sense of space from EP1 is largely gone- even in its sparsest moments this is a work that bears down on you, barely allowing any room to breathe. The level of detail is immense, but never too fussy. Yeezus collaborator Arca is on board as producer, neatly building a bridge toward his own Tricky worship on tracks like '2 Blunted' from his UNO album Stretch 2. It's closest to the moment where Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird gelled to wonderfully gloomy effect on 1995's Maxinquaye, finding a perfect meeting point for weed-fuelled paranoia and all-consuming love. Comparisons to trip-hop have come quickly in twigs' short career, most of them justified. 'I guess I'm stuck with me,' she sighs on 'Water Me'.

This release, a second four-track EP following her 2012 debut, triggers a dual feeling of being buried in her suffering and a sense of relief that her music provides an outlet for it all. In a recent Rising feature she comes across as bubbly, enthusiastic, even a little goofy. London-based FKA twigs is a musician whose work runs in direct contrast to her interview persona.

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