It’s destabilizing to learn that you can connect with someone in all matters of the flesh and mind, only to find that love isn’t at the other end. This is the anxiety at the heart of “Hard,” the cauterizing highlight on FKA twigs’ Eusexua Afterglow. She feels good in the midst of a fling, and her body responds in kind (“Wet thighs, I’m ecstatic”), but she knows that things go deeper than the physiological: “Would you do it if I didn't ask you? Would you give me your love, totally?” She sings these lines with concerned desperation, her voice so frail and afraid that it dissipates into vapor.
twigs knows no pleasure without pain, and so the song—co-produced with the German electronic musician Mechatok—oscillates between the sensual body music of Atlanta bass and the cold cybertronics of ’90s electro. The two imagine a sort of Drexciya-styled R&B, though any promise of utopia is thwarted by doubt and worry. A half-time breakdown offers a passage of sensuous fantasy, but just as she starts to feel ecstatic, crackling synthesizers jolt her back to reality. twigs always stuffs her tracks with dramatic pathos, and it’s her confluence of musical ideas and vocal flourishes that transform “Hard” into a dizzying portrait of romantic uncertainty. Love is treacherous, even humiliating in its demands; she knows that finding it is worth the potential heartbreak.
