"It felt like I’d made this ornate golden birdcage.
And I stepped in and was like, oh gosh,
this is actually a nightmare"

Though she didn’t make it public – and refuses to talk about it with me – in 2017 she split up with her long-term boyfriend Robert Pattinson, the Twilight Saga actor who’s set to be the next Batman. Their relationship had brought her tabloid scrutiny and weird fan abuse: Pattinson fans can be rabid, and racially trolled twigs on social media. After their split, she no longer had a home base in LA – plus she was ill (more about this later) and, most importantly for her, she was in an artistic fug.

She found the new album – Magdalene, her second – really hard to make, she says, mostly because she wanted to change but couldn’t figure out how. She began work on it as soon as she had finished her first, LP1, but couldn’t find the right sound, and couldn’t write songs in the way she wanted. Producers assumed she wanted to work with the fractured, futuristic noise of LP1 again and she felt trapped. Though she managed one song – Day Bed, which ends the album, and is about being depressed – she was stuck, workwise, in an artistry of her own making.

“I find it easy to write over complete musical randomness,” she says. “But that’s not what I wanted. I wanted something simpler, something honest. It felt like I’d made this ornate golden birdcage, and everything was so intricate – like tapestries and beading and beautiful wirework. And I stepped in and I locked the door and I was like, oh my gosh, this is actually a nightmare.”

With Robert Pattinson in 2016… Photograph: WireImage

Her process of breaking free ended up being pretty thorough. Her music altered, her relationship ended, her health went haywire. A disciplined workaholic, twigs sees life as a matter of spinning plates – “You have family and friends, and you have adult things, like where you live and bills and stuff like that, then your health, maybe your relationship” – and, for a while, around 2017, nearly all the plates dropped to the floor and smashed. “Everything was in complete turmoil,” she says. “The only thing that didn’t get smashed or shaken was one or two great friends.”

Things came to a head in LA, in just one week. She’d been searching for the right musical collaborator, and had found one in cult electronica artist Nicolas Jaar. They wrote Cellophane together in about 20 minutes, and she was thrilled. But she also felt physically terrible. She had a lump in her stomach that she’d been ignoring for months and one day that week, she woke and found she couldn’t sit up. She phoned her stepfather. “I said, ‘OK, I fucked up. I have some terrible thing in my stomach and it’s really big and I must have stomach cancer and I’ve not told anyone and I just don’t think there’s any coming back.’” Twigs says this all in rapid-fire full tragedy mode, rolling her eyes at herself. What did your stepfather say? “He said, ‘Go to the doctor.’”

…and Shia LaBeouf in 2018. Photograph: Backgrid

An ultrasound scan revealed not cancer, but fibroids – hormonal growths on her uterus. Twigs’s were enormous – “Two cooking apples, three kiwis and a couple of strawberries: a fruit bowl of pain,” as she described them on Instagram – and she had laparoscopic surgery, back in the UK. “They went in through three or four entry points” – she points at her stomach – “and pulled out the fibroids, like a string of sausages, through my bellybutton.”

She had been in pain for a while; plus the fibroids had been pressing down on her bowel and bladder, making her want to pee all the time and giving her unpleasant IBS symptoms. She remembers working on a video before the operation. “I had to do voguing in it and the choreographers, these two women, weren’t very nice and said, ‘You’re really lazy and you keep going to the toilet all the time.’ My whole life, I’d never been called lazy. It made me break down.”