Who’s to say what “grown up” really is? There’s certainly no one timetable to adulthood. And while Tahliah Barnett—the woman who as FKA twigs has become one of music’s most mesmerising new stars—may still be physically petite, there is no doubt in her mind that in those two years she has done a lot of growing up.

“Not to sound too psycho-babbly, but I’m 26,” says twigs, when I meet up with her during a quick trip to New York from her London home. “When I signed to XL/Young Turks, I was 24. And I think as a young woman, the mid-twenties are a strange time, because you get to 21 and kind of think that you’re a woman, that you’re grown up. And then you get to 24 and you suddenly realise you have no clue. At least for me anyway, I felt like a young girl trapped in a woman’s body. But I think getting signed and having that responsibility changed my life dramatically…I think that the last two years, from 24 into 26 was kind of my transition into being a grownup, and I think a lot of that reflects in the music as well.”

twigs is referring to the music on LP1, her superb debut album released last month, a record on which the Gloucestershire native with a penchant for outré style is singing for the first time with real confidence. As spellbinding and quietly seductive as the electro R&B of her first two releases was, 2012’s EP1 (a collaboration with Young Turks’ Tic Zogson) and 2013’s EP2 (created with Venezuelan New Yorker Alejandro “Arca” Ghersi) were also records more interested in atmosphere, space and muted vocals than in showcasing a self-assured artist. “I was very timid at first,” twigs (no capital “t”, please) recalls, “and I would sing into the mic really quietly. I would have to face away from people! And now it’s only two years on, but I feel a lot more confident, and from a place deep inside myself I just have a bit more belief in what I am doing.” 

The album features twigs’ strongest melodies to date, and hook lines that burrow in the brain, including “Lights On”’s memorable “If I trust you/ we can do it with the lights on”, which despite how it sounds has less to do with sex, she says, than with opening yourself up to another. She had no shortage of top-flight writing and production names as collaborators on the record: Adele’s right hand man Paul Epworth, who co-wrote the soaring standout “Pendulum”; UK electro hotshot Sampha (a co-nominee with twigs for the BBC’s lauded “Sound of 2014” prize); Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes; Michael Volpe, aka Clams Casino; and on three tracks, including the steamy first single “Two Weeks”, Emile Haynie, whose CV includes Lana Del Rey’s debut Born to Die. But there is a remarkable consistency to LP1, which, twigs says, was the point. “Working with so many different people, it just meant that my own vision and my own stamp had to really focus on,” she explains. “I’m always determined to do something that really feels like me, and I don’t want to copy anyone or have anyone be able to compare me to anyone.” She’s also keen to point out that she self-produced “over half” the album, and played on most of it, challenging herself to learn (with the assistance of her longtime friend and bandmate Cy An) to create music on Ableton and the drum machine Tempest, which she’s been folding into her band’s live shows.

twigs seems to have something to prove this time around. After all, this is a young woman who saw a good amount of media attention on her EP’s going to her male partners on the projects, particularly Arca, thanks to his being a hot name after his work on Kanye’s Yeezus. Even in the studio working on the album, twigs was on the receiving end of some snarky comments that seemed to doubt her ability. “When I’m at the computer, I’m like a little mole staring up at the screen. And people will walk in and be like, ‘Ooh check you out, using the computer!’ and they don’t mean it in a harmful way. But if I was a boy they wouldn’t say that.” While she’s not naming names, she later vents, “Some people, they want to keep you in your place. They want you to do well, but only on their terms. And as soon as you start exceeding that, they just like to kick you back down, so you stay exactly where they want you to be.” 

That condescension, innocent or not, stuck with her, and her frequent confidante in those times, toward the end of making the album, was Jesse Kanda—the visual artist and filmmaker who turned twigs into a wind-up Manga doll from another planet for 2013’s “Water Me” video. Apparently inspired by twigs’ tales of verbal injuries, Kanda outdid himself in creating LP2’s artwork, one of the most striking cover images of the year: a close-up of the artist’s pixie face, looking both clown-like and bruised, wistful, resilient, wiser, a girl who’s been through it. When Kanda first showed twigs the cover, she says, “I was just completely taken aback. It just made me so emotional, because it just showed me that all those weeks I’d been going into him and explaining to him how I felt, even though he was so quiet…he’d been listening the whole time. Because that’s how it felt, like a smack in the face. I have this mark on my face that seems like it’s been inflicted on me, but it makes me more beautiful in the picture.”

There’s no denying that the part-Jamaican, part-Spanish twigs has become a fashion favorite, one of the more exotic and adventurous young style icons to emerge since Björk. Red lips, septum ring and Josephine Baker spit curls are frequent parts of her look, but from there she can go in wildly different directions. In photo shoots we’ve seen her work neo-Diana Ross, and latter-day Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes (these are, by the way, the sort of comparisons she probably loathes), as well as alabaster skin and a distended neck for her EP2 cover. And while she doesn’t shy away from a connection to the fashion world—soundtracking a show this summer for her friends Ben Cottrell and Matt Dainty of the London menswear line Cottweiler—she insists that she and her manager always bring it back to music. “Whenever I get offered an opportunity, even if it’s really good—like a couple of big brands have approached me and asked me to do modelling for them, and obviously it’s exciting—we always say, “Well, what is the justification for this? What is it saying about the music?” That is the decision on which we base absolutely everything. It’s like, “Is the music leading this decision?” 

On the music video front, twigs has amassed one of the most arresting portfolios we’ve ever seen from a young artist only two years into a career: nine stunners, from her provocative phallic-flower-in-naked-crotch debut, “Hide”, to her latest, the Nabil-directed “Two Weeks”, in which she’s a Nubian queen surrounded by miniature gyrating dancers in the Temple of Dendur. Might we see a video for every track from LP1? Twigs isn’t so sure. “For me, when I do something, once that thing starts catching on, I’m over it,” she explains. “I’m like, ‘OK, next!’ I mean, I would like to do as many visuals as I can, but there are other things now that I’m excited about that I feel are my baby, and I want to work on them secretly and when they come out it will be like ‘ta-da!!’ Maybe like a new thing that no one’s ever thought of, you know?” Besides, she says, all those videos take time. “I’ll sit there and I’ll edit a video with someone until like four o’clock in the morning. I’m really involved in every single bit.”

There she goes again, reminding us that she is not on the sidelines of anything she does. Only four years ago Twigs was herself one of those backing dancers, playing a marionette on strings in electropop gal Jessie J’s “Price Tag” video. She is no one’s puppet today, but she’s also quick to point about that she’s not the “control freak”, that she’s been described as in the press too many times for her liking. “This whole control freak thing, I think it’s so silly. I think if anything that’s peoples’ intimidation, or needing to be neggy about something”, she says, adding that challenging herself has less to do with control than with making the most of her moment—and twigs is indisputably enjoying a moment. “I’m just taking what I do seriously and try really hard because I don’t know how long it’s gonna last. Not because maybe it will get taken away from me, but I don’t know, maybe I will just decide I want to have a baby in two years. Or I might decide I want to go set up a youth club and spend time doing that, or start a school for kids doing dancing. I just want to work really hard while I’ve got this opportunity.”