The resurgence of FKA twigs has been a long time coming, and she’s clawed her way out from beneath a crippling medical condition and a publicly scrutinized relationship to rebirth herself, a journey that is represented metaphorically in the jaw-dropping video for her comeback single, “cellophane.” The song is a stunner in its own right, an uncharacteristically organic ballad that centers twigs’ nuanced and devastating vocal delivery. “Didn’t I do it for you?/Why don’t I do it for you?/Why won’t you do it for me/When all I do is for you?” she murmurs and belts and snarls, each intonation subtly shifting her meaning. By the end of the song, both she and the listener are emotionally spent, and her final words come out in a whimper: “They’re waiting and hoping I’m not enough.” It never fails to leave me with wet eyes and serves as proof of her remarkable growth as an artist. She may have spent much of the past five years flying under the radar, but she certainly hasn’t been lazy.

It’s hard to imagine an entire album’s worth of songs rising to the level of “cellophane,” but MAGDALENE does it, many times over. FKA twigs recruits a wide array of collaborators, ranging from Nicolas Jaar to Skrillex to Oneohtrix Point Never, and uses artists like Kate Bush and Björk as clear touchstones, but the album feels more distinctly her own than anything she’s released before. It takes bits and pieces from these various influences and gleefully scrambles them before tossing them into a blender, resulting in a phantasmagoric collage of otherworldly noises that sounds unlike anything I’ve heard before. The most extreme example is “fallen alien,” which finds twigs wailing about “this age of Satan,” straining for dominance over a truly demonic backdrop of chopped-up samples and dissonant chords. There’s a strange sense of beauty in the chaos, though, which allows it to slot easily among the album’s more restrained moments. “sad day” is a clear highlight in this vein, a hypnotic ballad that sounds a bit like something a fairytale princess might sing - if she were descending into an Ambien-induced technicolor dream.

MAGDALENE’s production is thrilling, but it would be empty without the equally evocative lyrics and vocals. No other voice could inject as much passion and heartbreak into these songs as twigs does with her acrobatic delivery, and her lyrics alternate seamlessly between minute observations (“Fearless are my cacti/Friendly are the fruit flies”) and broad declarations (“I never seen a hero like me in a sci-fi/But I’d save a life if I thought it belonged to you”). Altogether, the album cements her status as one of the most fascinating and fearless musicians of our time.