On a seemingly unstoppable mission to create visuals for her songs with Jordan Hemingway, the latest video from FKA Twigs is “Love Crimes,” the first track on Eusexua Afterglow. And, as the first track, it aims to lure the listener into the rest of the album immediately. Sonically, “Love Crimes” had already established itself as a late 90s-inspired number (in contrast to the apparently more 2000s stylings of “Predictable Girl”). But with the video, Twigs and Hemingway drive that point home by emulating many of the styles and aesthetics that The Prodigy and Chemical Brothers paraded in some of their late 90s visual masterpieces. In the former’s case, that included 1997’s “Smack My Bitch Up” directed by Jonas Åkerlund and in the latter’s case, that included 1999’s “Hey Boy Hey Girl” directed by Nic and Dom.
Twigs starts her own homage to this era with some pointedly “gritty” exterior shots of London (including the BT Tower) before Hemingway then homes his camera in on a street featuring a storefront with a sign that reads, in all caps, “Porno Shop.” There’s then even a “Ray of Light”-esque moment when Hemingway cuts to a scene of traffic going “faster than the speed of light” (to quote said Madonna song), in a maneuver that feels very reminiscent of that Jonas Åkerlund-directed video (indeed, Madonna had expressly reached out to Åkerlund to direct it after seeing his work for “Smack My Bitch Up”). Which is, of course, to be expected considering that Eusexua is very much inspired by Ray of Light. The “sped-up” visuals continue as the song bursts out with, “You don’t understand/I had to let you go.” This repeated as Twigs appears walking in a decidedly “zombie-like” (meets drunk) fashion while wearing an all-white ensemble that includes some very noticeable, let’s call them, “raver boots.”
As she wanders through the city like a creature of the night looking for her next club fix (not to mention her next human fix), another scene then shows her staring into the mirror of a public restroom as she sees a woman in the reflection behind her. A woman who wears the same blonde wig that we’ll soon see Twigs wearing (indeed, the woman does look very much like her). Twigs glances back at her like a vampire who’s hungry and then follows her into the stall. This being perhaps the closest parallel to the lead of “Hey Boy Hey Girl” (played by Hanne Klintoe in the woman’s adult form, for the video starts out with her as a child) glancing back in the public restroom of the club where she’s currently tripping balls on ecstasy—the bottle of water a dead giveaway. In fact, it’s the falling of that bottle from the counter and then rolling underneath one of the stalls that leads to her own salacious discovery: two people fucking behind the door where her bottle disappeared (and, because the crux of the video’s “gimmick” is all about, let’s say, transparency, she sees them as skeletons “bopping around” rather indiscriminately on top of the toilet seat cover (as if public restrooms even have the unicorn luxury of a toilet seat cover anymore—such is how far trust in the average human’s ability to not somehow ruin public property has fallen).
Twigs doesn’t encounter anything quite so “sci-fi” in her bathroom stall (though she does herself appear sci-fi with that glowing “stegosaurus” spine of hers in this scene), instead approaching the woman who looks like her. She then gets down on her knees and caresses the woman’s face before pressing her cheek to the woman’s. But while it might initially seem sexual in nature (or even perhaps a bit narcissistic, with Twigs being attracted to her doppelgänger like this), in the next instant, the exchange reads more like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. For the camera whips around back toward the sink in a POV-type manner that indicates someone’s loss of control. And it must have been the woman’s because, now, all of the sudden, that woman’s hair has spontaneously attached itself to Twigs’ head. She then looks at herself lovingly in the mirror again with this new “persona” to admire as the woman she left in the bathroom stall essentially “glitches out” (specifically, her face). But that’s no matter to this new and wig-improved Twigs, who leaves the joint more confident than ever—a confidence only encouraged by the ogling of two men standing outside. She ends up kissing both of them in a different venue and leaving them “glitched out” as well (which means their faces look like they’re shaking at warp speed).
So it is that the theme of the song is being well highlighted: Twigs is going around town and committing these various “love crimes,” showcasing behavior that very much underscores the lyrics, “Hard times/Call for love crimes/You might be the one/But now I’m done.” Hence, her flitting from one “subject” to another so willy-nilly. Much the same as the “hero” of “Smack My Bitch Up,” who goes on an extreme tear through the clubs of London (with the gimmick of that video being that it’s all shot from the lead’s POV until the end, which reveals that the person behind this ribald, “laddish” behavior is actually a woman).
As for Twigs, although she was feeling sated after her last “kisses of death,” in the midst of “going in for the kill” on her next victim outside of another club (or, as Gaga would say, “‘nother club, ‘nother club”), she’s interrupted by the mark’s girlfriend, who takes him away from her, leaving Twigs so disappointed that she falls like a heap onto the floor. Although she’s briefly deflated in this moment and also while seated at the next bar, she’s able to perk up at the sight of another victim going into the bathroom there. Following her in, she quickly reemerges looking much more rejuvenated.
Her path of destruction persists when she knocks a man’s phone out of his hand and leads him to a car (presumably his) where she briefly lets him believe this is about “love” (or even “lust”) when, really, it’s all about draining him, so to speak, for her own twisted purposes. The bender goes on unabated as Hemingway delivers full-on “Ray of Light” video mode amidst Twigs pursuing her final victims before triumphantly spinning around in the middle of the street (made to look like she’s doing so in reverse) and waiting, one assumes, to be beamed up by her ship. For what else could that blinding light in her eyes that makes her look so happy be? (On a side note, aliens seem to be all the rage right now, between Bugonia and Pluribus.)
Clearly someone who has an affinity for late 90s music and aesthetics, Twigs revives it again here with a kind of authenticity that is rare to see in most attempts at appealing to nostalgia. Of course, maybe one thing to not be nostalgic about when it comes to the late 90s is how much easier it actually was to get away with “love crimes.”
