FKA twigs
Eusexua
ATLANTIC/YOUNG

The first sound heard on FKA twigs’ third album Eusexua is a racing heartbeat. It’s a thrilling ultrasound introduction to a world of sweat, euphoria, anxiety, isolation, and community—one big grey area filled with highs and lows. I’d expect nothing less from the world-creating, holistic artist’s follow-up to her magnum opus MAGDALENE and her first proper album on Atlantic Records. That said, it’s not her first release on the major label: In 2022, she shared CAPRISONGS, her shedding skin in mixtape form wherein the project’s Weeknd-featuring lead single “tears in the club” found her exorcising an ex’s claim to her body. She used the dancefloor as a battleground for conflicting emotions and physical reactions.

Eusexua elevates these paradoxes brought out in a vulnerable place like a dingy club. This new album isn’t simply a love letter to rave culture, but instead serves to embrace that scene for all of its angels and demons. Eusexua is twigs’ own definition of a nowness, and it’s something we’ve been starved of for a fatal amount of time. Wary of how the moment tends to die with the phone, twigs described “eusexua” as “pure presence. It’s a moment of nothingness. Or it’s the moment before a really incredible idea. I’ve experienced ‘eusexua’ when kissing someone I don’t know really well, but I really like. So it’s this ego-less presence which is just filled with this kind of tingling clarity.” It’s physical, cerebral, spiritual, and sensual all at once. What she’s describing is the magic of being human—being conscious of beauty and destruction and how they inform each other.

Eusexua celebrates mystery, curiosity, danger, and sensation while insisting that there are unknown treasures in sounds reminiscent of pop’s past (many have drawn parallels to Madonna’s Ray of Light, for example). She uses a familiar sonic bounce to unlock a new form of intimacy by staring directly at the face of anonymity on tracks like “Perfect Stranger.” Her dedication to intention and shapeshifting culture through art is what makes her a once-in-a-generation voice. Eusexua pushes her artistry to another level—creating new language, pointing to a void and defining it. Mostly, this sonic world is as expansive as the conceptual one. On “Striptease,” she manages to make a borderline-horrific pogoing melody sound elegant, unnerving, and dangerous as she finds a perfect match for her fine art of chaos in producer Koreless.

Moments throughout feel like a sublime ego death—the glitchy, pummeling percussion on “Drums of Death,” the funhouse-mirror switchups and vocal gymnastics on “Room of Fools,” the chilling sublimation of sound on “24hr Dog.” But there are also moments that feel like internal conflict, with some songs sounding confused in their placement. I’m not sure if it’s the tracklisting or the jumpscare of North West rapping about god on “Childlike Things,” but having Ye on the brain made me feel like “Wanderlust” could live among Life of Pablo, while the gentle piano on “Sticky” recalls 2010’s “Blame Game” and its sampling of Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th.” That former track, though, is a pure example of shifting realms as it closes the album with a sobering comedown—twinkling guitar morphing into shadowy breakbeats, twigs’ raw, Auto-Tuned reflections fusing with operatic ascensions. It makes sense. But the journey there is riddled with bizarre sensations that rupture Eusexua’s matrix.

Still, Eusexua feels like FKA twigs’ truest album to date, one where she finds revelation in ugliness. “We’re open wounds / Just bleeding out the pressure / And it feels nice.” twigs writes herself into a long history that reiterates that the club is more than just a physical space. It’s a place of healing and destruction and rebuilding. It’s a place to surround yourself with strangers enduring this process, a place where you see a stranger writhing next to you and then another one staring at you in the bathroom mirror. “I was on the edge of something greater than before, but nobody told me,” she divulges on the title track. She always was, and she still is—and from this vantage point, it seems like she always will be.

FLOOD

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