FKA twigs will curate Meltdown at the Southbank Centre from 10 to 20 June 2027.
FKA twigs will curate Meltdown at the Southbank Centre from 10 to 20 June 2027.
Eleven days, one curator and one headline slot she has kept for herself. FKA twigs has been named the curator of Meltdown 2027, the Southbank Centre’s annual takeover in London, which runs from 10 to 20 June across the centre’s 11-acre site. She will build a line-up that reflects the influences behind her own sound, drawn from across genres, and headline one of the days herself.
The announcement on 20 October made FKA twigs the festival’s 32nd curator. Five days later, at a talk in Paris, she offered a rare look at how she is working ahead of it: offline for months, cautious about AI and preparing to play Josephine Baker on screen.
What a Meltdown Curator Actually Does
Meltdown hands one artist the programme of a multi-arts centre for most of a fortnight. The curator chooses the acts and shapes the programme, which turns the festival into a portrait of one person’s taste. For FKA twigs, that means a line-up reflecting the diverse influences behind her own sound, bringing together artists from across musical genres, according to NME.
Time Out describes the format as free rein for the curator to pick favourite musicians, nightlife collectives and local creatives across a programme of gigs, participatory events and after-hours parties on the venue’s stages. Its report adds that FKA twigs, whom it calls a Grammy and MOBO Award-winning electronic musician, will headline with a “landmark” one-off performance, and that the festival opens on Thursday 10 June and closes on Sunday 20 June.
Her appointment was announced alongside a 2027 season that already lists performances by the pianist Lang Lang, Patti Smith and the composer Philip Glass, NME reports. Line-up and ticket details for Meltdown itself will follow later. NME notes she is a past winner of its Godlike Genius Award, one more sign of how far her reputation runs beyond the charts.
The appointment also suits the shape of her career. FKA twigs works as a singer, dancer and visual artist, and a multi-arts centre gives her room to programme all three rather than a single stage of headliners.
The Curators She Follows
The list she joins is the festival’s main selling point. Previous Meltdown curators include David Bowie, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, Grace Jones, Christine and the Queens, Nile Rodgers, Robert Smith, David Byrne, Yoko Ono, Anohni, Massive Attack, Little Simz and Jarvis Cocker.
The 2026 edition was curated by Harry Styles, whose programme featured Orlando Weeks, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, Soulwax, Bar Italia, Jon Hopkins and Dev Hynes. It opened in June with Warpaint, playing their first show in nearly two years. That mix of established names and left-field picks is the template FKA twigs inherits.
Why London Shaped the Booking
Her statement was a short autobiography of the city. “I am honoured and excited to be curating Meltdown at the Southbank Centre,” she said. “The potent artistic and cultural landscape in London has raised me from Croydon College, to performing in underground cabaret clubs, dancing till sunrise in warehouses on the docks and last year being lucky enough to sing my operatic songs in one of the largest arenas in London.”
She went on: “The cultural and artistic clash in this city is like no other. Where cultures, sounds, stories and traditions from all over the world meet, collide and transform one another. I intend to bring you a slice of all that has raised me and continues to inspire me: celebrating the diversity, freedom and creative energy that I believe makes London one of the world’s great capitals of music and the arts.”
Read as a brief, that points to a programme drawing on club culture, cabaret and dance as well as music. It is a different proposition from this autumn’s arena pop runs, which pophits.news followed when Gracie Abrams lined up SNL 32 days before her arena tour.
Hometown Meltdown Takes the Idea to Six Cities
Alongside the London festival, the Southbank Centre is launching its first Hometown Meltdown, a nationwide version held in grassroots music venues and run in partnership with Music Venue Trust. Each of six two-day events is curated by an artist from that area, mixing local acts with more established names from elsewhere in the country:
- 12 to 13 December: Kelly Lee Owens at Neuadd Ogwen, Bethesda, Wales
- 30 to 31 January: Stewart Lee at The Cornish Bank, Falmouth
- 13 to 14 February: Kathryn Joseph at Beat Generator, Dundee
- 23 to 24 February: Jamie Cullum at Chinnerys, Southend
- 2 to 3 March: Pauline Black of The Selecter at Peggy’s Skylight, Nottingham
- 25 to 26 March: Rhoda Dakar at FORGE Warehouse, Sheffield
“Grassroots Music Venues are often overlooked in conversations about the cultural infrastructure for the UK, even though they provide access to incredible live music in well over 800 locations across the four nations,” said Beverley Whitrick, chief operating officer of Music Venue Trust.
What She Said About AI in Paris
On 25 October FKA twigs spoke at the Institut du monde arabe as part of Paris’s Reference Festival, alongside her partner, the photographer and director Jordan Hemingway, after a screening of one of her live concert recordings. Numéro attended, and her comments on artificial intelligence were measured rather than absolute.
“We need more rules and regulations to ensure that AI is used safely. I’m neither for nor against it,” she said. She separated tools that work like advanced computer-generated imagery from AI that draws on artists’ work, which she said raises questions of intellectual property, and added that she wants to discuss the issue before Congress.
Her line on voice and style imitation was clear. Tools that let users create a song by imitating a particular artist’s style or using someone else’s voice are “obviously” a problem, she said, “unless the artists concerned gave their consent and received some form of recognition, whether financial compensation or credit.”
Five Months Offline and a Josephine Baker Role
She also explained why she has stepped away from the internet. “I haven’t been on the Internet for about five months now, not at all,” she said, adding that a collaborator runs her online presence while the words and images remain hers. Her reason was creative: she does not want to be unconsciously shaped by what algorithms put in front of everyone.
The rest of the talk turned to film. FKA twigs plays Josephine Baker in a biopic directed by Maïmouna Doucouré, a role she described as personal: her mother introduced her to Baker as a child, at a time when she rarely saw mixed-race stars. “There is only one Josephine Baker, and I cannot be her,” she said. Her aim, she explained, is to capture Baker’s work ethic and vulnerability rather than to imitate her.
Musically, Meltdown follows a run that began with EUSEXUA, named NME’s third-best album of 2025, and its companion EUSEXUA Afterglow. In June she released “On Your Mind” featuring Lil Yachty, her first new music of 2026. With line-up details still to come, the clearest guide to her Meltdown is the talk she gave in Paris: careful about technology, rooted in London, and more interested in range than in hits.
The next dates to watch come before June. Line-ups and ticket on-sale dates for Meltdown will be announced in due course, according to Time Out, and the first Hometown Meltdown arrives much sooner, with Kelly Lee Owens hosting two days at Neuadd Ogwen in Bethesda on 12 and 13 December. For a curator who has spent five months away from her own feeds, the programme she announces next will say a great deal about what she has been listening to while offline.
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