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EUSEXUA

FKA twigs Eusexua

9.1

Best New Music

  • Genre:

    Electronic / Pop/R&B

  • Label:

    Young

  • Reviewed:

    January 24, 2025

Twigs’ third album brings club music into her sensual, supernatural world. It’s a masterful pop-star moment for the artist.

The first rule of eusexua is that you never stop talking about eusexua. For months, in anticipation of her third proper album named after this newly coined word, FKA twigs has defined eusexua by example. “Eusexua is for the girls who find their true selves under a hard metal silver stiletto on the damp rave floor,” read part of the text over a blurry TikTok video of her eyes darting around a room. It’s the feeling of, “I’m that bitch,” according to makeup artist Joe Brooks in a promo video uploaded to YouTube. “Eusexua is a practice. Eusexua is a state of being. Eusexua is the pinnacle of human experience,” reads the title card at the end of the video for the album’s title track. But what does any of that mean?

In an interview on Vogue’s The Run-Through podcast, twigs described eusexua as a kind of flow state in which one can lose track of time. She also revealed a tangible definition: “For me, it’s also the moment before I get a really good idea of pure clarity. Like, when everything moves out the way, everything in your mind is completely blank and your mind is elevated.” In The Standard, she called eusexua “that moment of nothingness just before a big surge of inspiration or creativity or passion. I describe it as a moment before an orgasm.”

Ah, clarity. There wasn’t really a word for that referenced special moment of blankness, which carries such a thrill because 1) you know whatever is about to happen is about to happen, but 2) you have no idea how it’ll go. That oncoming orgasm could be the best orgasm of your life. Eusexua is why May is the best month of summer and why ordering and retrieving your coke is sometimes more fun than doing it. The sureness of achievement plus hope for its totality is a hell of a drug. If nothing else, “eusexua” is more useful than most made-up words in pop music—from “Californication” to “Fergilicious” to “sussudio” to “zig-a-zig-ah.”

For further justification, look no further than “Eusexua” the song, where atop a track-length four-on-the-floor club crescendo, twigs relates: “Words cannot describe, baby/This feeling deep inside.” Here she explicitly reaffirms her alignment with art’s imperative of expressing what previously went unexpressed. At the same time, the track’s form is familiar: On a fundamental level, the bangers on EUSEXUA bang like once and future bangers. As she flits from techno to house to garage to drum and bass, the behavior of the almighty bass remains recognizable. She’s balancing saying something new with knowing what has always worked, a Goldilocks approach to making pop. And while it would be a stretch to call twigs a pop star at this point in time (she’s never had a pop chart hit in any territory besides New Zealand), that isn’t stopping her from running circles around virtually everyone else with a legitimate claim for the title. The concept, the sound, and the look—particularly the apocalypse-in-the-front, party-in-the-back hairstyle she’s been rocking lately, inspired by ancient Egypt—all make EUSEXUA an era for the ages.

The pivot to club music is a pop trope for artists of all magnitudes, from Beyoncé to Britney to Jessie Ware. twigs has taken pains to explain her personal connection to dance music: She “fell in love” with techno a few summers ago while filming 2024’s The Crow remake in Prague—she wrote at least one song—EUSEXUA’s euphoric centerpiece “Room of Fools”—in the bathroom of a club. This coincided with “a huge healing journey” that required “learning how to use and live in my body again,” according to an interview with Dazed. Still, she opted to describe the album as “a love letter to how dance music makes me feel,” rather than straight-up dance music. She can call it what she wants—the legions of bodies she will propel render the final verdict.

Much of the material here will lure people to the dancefloor by invoking recognizable forms or being flat-out reminiscent of other tracks—“Eusexua” is the most unabashedly Eurodance release to pass itself off as cool since forever, the guitar and midtempo bounce of “Girl Feels Good” achieve something reminiscent of “Swim” from Madonna’s Ray of Light, and the single “Perfect Stranger” is pop garage retro-retroism, just a swing away from Disclosure’s “You & Me.” Lyrically, that last track is so in line with the culture of cruising, its narrator practically fetishizing her object of desire’s anonymity (“I don’t know the name of the town you’re from/Your star sign or the school you failed/I don’t know and I don’t care”), that it belongs to the tradition of songs sung by women that speak directly to queer male experience, like Inner Life’s “I’m Caught Up (In a One Night Love Affair)” and Miquel Brown’s “So Many Men, So Little Time.”

EUSEXUA’s songs don’t stay in one place for long, which is to say that they themselves dance. A house beat interrupts the choral solemnity of “Keep It, Hold It.” In the last 30 seconds of “Perfect Stranger” the garage gives way to the steady thump of a kick drum. The chrome-covered post-trap of the ballad “Striptease” yields to a drum’n’bass storm that’s more than double the BPM. As the breaks break in, a wordless keening vocal unfurls—it’s very “experience Pure Moods” (that’s a compliment), and then after a cycle, four-on-the-floors come charging in to give the track more of a juke feel. “Sticky,” initially a wisp of a sexy electronic ballad, picks up more as it goes along, with full percussion and rhythmic sampled voices filling out the bridge and then a static-caked final breakdown just a step or two away from dubstep.

Augmenting this on-the-fly genetic editing of the tracks is a world of beguiling sounds–it simply wouldn’t be a twigs album without them. On EUSEXUA, the alien’s in the details. The piano on “Sticky” sounds like “Avril 14th” if that song’s keys were instead ping-pong balls. Voices in the coda of “Keep It, Hold It” appear to be fused with woodwinds. Metallic scratches form over the breakdown of “Room of Fools.” “Drums of Death” stutters and glitches for sport. Though it’s the most avant track here overall, “Drums” epitomizes the ethos of twigs and her main co-producer Koreless: Chop up as much as possible to create fully articulated mechanized beasts of songs. It’s all mastered gorgeously, with reliably distinct separation of sounds and vast dynamic range. A lineup of star beatmakers, mostly credited for “additional production,” also worked on these tracks, including Stuart Price, Nico Jaar, Marius de Vries, Sasha, Stargate, and Eartheater.

The most distinct sound in twigs’ music remains her voice. It’s sonic titanium—light and unfathomably strong. She evinces more versatility than ever—grunting and growling on “Room of Fools,” hand-game chanting “Childlike Things” alongside North West who, no shit, praises Jesus in a Japanese rap verse. When twigs describes her state on “Eusexua” as “King sized/I’m vertical sunrised/Like flying capsized,” she sounds somewhere between blissed out and weeping. The hook of “Room of Fools” is a succinct evaluation of the club that has her so entranced: “It feels nice.” The way she sings it is a near yodel, a melismatic unfurling of syllables from the back of her throat, as addictive and impossible for plebs to sing as the chorus of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.”

As “Room of Fools” winds down, twigs rhapsodizes about the process of losing oneself on the dancefloor: “The night I saw you/In a room of fools/I knew I could conjure/Be whoever I please.” Identity dissolution is a motif on an album whose songs are largely about negotiating comfort within the greater world. On the bottoming anthem “24 Hour Dog,” she takes a pragmatic approach to submission: “Your love chores distract me from my worst flaws/Setting free/The softest part of me.” Repeatedly, twigs sings of the difficulty she has in baring her true self: “Opening me feels like a striptease.” Just as her songs work to find their final forms, so does twigs, whose persona has come a long way from the “eerie, post-humanist, Uncanny Valley-girl aesthetic” of her 2014 debut.

twigs remains a challenging and beguiling figure in contemporary music, but over the past decade, she’s softened a bit to let in more soul, fun, and humor. EUSEXUA is more a thawing than a complete reimagining of twigs as a pop artist, retaining her quirks and fixations while telling a story of transformation through club music. Our lady of perpetual healing is both a model and guru on an album that’s always concerning itself with the boundless potential of imagination. Over the gentle breaks of the final song, “Wanderlust,” she tells us, “I’ll be in my head if you need me.” Like much of EUSEXUA, the song is conversant with pop but not beholden to it. In other words, twigs has found her sweet spot.

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FKA twigs: EUSEXUA