R&B is always up to something interesting if you know where to look. Frank Ocean, Blood Orange, SZA, H.E.R., The Weeknd and others stretched the bounds of the genre to the point where folks started talking about “alternative R&B” in the 2010s, and FKA Twigs entered the room with LP1. In line with the ’90s trip-hop of Portishead and Tricky, Twigs exists in a futuristically sensuous space best exemplified by LP1’s “Two Weeks,” “Pendulum” and “Video Girl” (all released as singles). Visuals are also impossible to separate from Twigs’s overall artistic statement, as the contortionist pole dancing in her music videos proves.

– Miles Marshall Lewis