By Annabel Ross
FKA Twigs’ Eusexua: a bold work of sexual reclamation.
FKA Twigs, Eusexua
Like Charli XCX, FKA Twigs has drawn inspiration from club music on her third LP, Eusexua. Unlike Charli, Twigs doesn’t have stadiums in her sights. She expresses the rawest of human emotions through song, dance and visual art, and she describes Eusexua as “a love letter to how dance music makes me feel”, rather than a dance-music album proper.
The British artist has a devoted audience who have been hanging on her every move since she put out LP1 in 2014 as a 26-year-old – until then she had been best known as a back-up dancer for the likes of Kylie Minogue, Ed Sheeran and Jessie J. Twigs has always been destined to be a star, but she was always going to do it her way, too. That’s why the neo-R&B/alt-pop LP1 came out on a (very hip) indie label, and why she sings about abuse and power and racism and control in ways that were never designed for the radio.
The title Eusexua is deliberately obtuse, according to Twigs. The name came to her when she was in Prague filming The Crow, last year’s poorly received reboot of the 1994 film starring Brandon Lee. Twigs wound up at a rave on the outskirts of town losing herself to Eurodance, a feeling that brought to mind that clear-eyed moment before orgasm, or “when you’ve been kissing a lover for hours and turn into an amoeba with that person”, she told Vogue. The title track does a good job of evoking this sensation; synths wind up tantalisingly, like a seductive jack-in-the-box, and unfurl with an added charge of bass and a four-to-the-floor pulse.
There’s plenty of Ray of Light-era Madonna on the album, never less so than on Girl Feels Good, which cribs from Beautiful Stranger, with murky trip-hop bass lines and dank western guitar-plucking underneath Twigs’ clear, airy soprano. It comes with a message for the Andrew Tate acolytes listening: “A girl feels good and the world goes ’round/Turn your love up loud to keep the devil down”. Kylie Minogue’s criminally underrated 1997 club album Impossible Princess (predating Ray of Light) sounds like another sonic touchpoint, as does ’90s Bjork, heard most in Twigs’ insanely elastic wail.
Perfect Stranger is a more modern pop-dance track; it makes sense that Norwegian super-producer team Stargate contributed to its arrangement of more humdrum, club-lite synths. The sex-positive lyrics are somewhat redemptive, implying that the less one knows the better when having a one-night-stand with an hours-fresh crush.
Album centrepiece Room of Fools picks up on the wind-up motif from the first track, but gets down to business immediately, shifting into a sensual metronomic beat against which eerier elements of the track play off each other. About 75 seconds in, bright trance keys cut through the mix like sunlight piercing through warehouse windows after a six-hour session at a rave. “It feels nice,” Twigs sings, channelling Kate Bush. It sounds heavenly.
When Twigs refers to “eusexua” as a moment of clarifying blankness, she might be speaking of how techno transcendence helped her overcome bodily and psychic pains. In 2020, Twigs accused actor Shia LaBeouf of physical and sexual assault throughout their nearly year-long relationship from 2018-2019 (LaBeouf has denied “each and every allegation”). The trial has been postponed until September, but Eusexua can be read as a reclaiming of her sexual autonomy and a harnessing of the healing powers of dance and sex, carried out on her own terms. She’s still vulnerable but she knows that self-exposure is the ultimate tool and weapon of the true artist. Eusexua is her most revealing pursuit yet.
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