FKA Twigs Is Reaching New Heights. She Calls It Eusexua

Review: Her new album is surprisingly horny, propulsive, hopeful and blissed out.

Hard to believe it’s really been a decade-plus since FKA Twigs started perfuming this confused planet with sci-fi lullabies, but it’s hard to believe a lot right now. Since the 2014 drop of LP1, the British avant-pop singer’s dizzying debut album, our collective grasp of time has been smashed and smeared by a lethal pandemic, a deepening sense of digital isolation and a future that feels more and more difficult to imagine.

Maybe Twigs has been attuned to this all along. Trained as a dancer, she has been duly delicate and deliberate in her balladry from the very start, singing in a precious Victorian shiver over cold, asymmetrical click-clacks that sound like the work of Foley artists struggling to learn polyrhythm. Her early music was enchanting in its alien beauty, but equally frustrating in that it rarely seemed to be going anywhere. Futurism without forward motion. Pirouettes in the meat locker.

Then something wonderful shook loose in 2022, with Caprisongs, a collection of club-minded songs that found Twigs dropping the solemnity and letting the beat ride. The pandemic was ending (kinda) and here was an album eager to help us get out of our heads and on to the dance floor, reacquainting us with our bodies and reminding us how drums can move time forward. Necessary work, then and now. Thankfully, it continues on her fabulous new album, Eusexua, with Twigs funnelling all the flinty rigour of her early recordings into something surprisingly horny, propulsive, hopeful and blissed out.

Okay, first, Eusexua. It’s a concept word, a portmanteau of “euphoria” and “sex” with an alleged meaning that expands far beyond that. With the “Brat summer” discourse a mere six months in society’s rear view, can we all please do our best to understand this shiny new pop word as a cardinal point more than a brand name?

In interviews, Twigs has described Eusexua as the “pinnacle of human experience”, a heightened sense of presence that doesn’t necessarily have to involve sex and that any willing person can strive to achieve. More tangibly, Eusexua is also the name of the song that starts the album, and in it Twigs assumes a fairy godmotherly falsetto to ask, “Do you feel alone? You’re not alone.” So Eusexua is a sort of anti-loneliness too? A more interesting and apt definition wafts by earlier in the verse, describing the titular sensation as “flying capsized” – something heavily freighted inexplicably floating into the air.

Whatever it might mean, the spore of the idea reportedly bloomed at a rave Twigs attended in Prague back in 2022 – a night of wild abandon and deep communion not often available to relatively conspicuous pop singers of the social media age. But even in the least-inhibited moments of these new songs, her exactitude stays hardwired.

During the Kylie Minogue-ish bounce of Perfect Stranger, Twigs is trying to keep a potential one-night stand anonymous and she can’t seem to get this person to shut up about astrology: “Please don’t say that I must know.” It’s impossible to imagine anyone saying that exact sequence of words in the awkward heat of this moment – which, in addition to upholding her music’s fundamental sexy-prim friction, is a nice reminder that songs can do impossible things. Later, on 24hr Dog, Twigs pants, “I’m a dog for you”, then delivers a pristine little yelp that rivals the cartoon puppy howl Shakira gave in She Wolf.

There’s a decent possibility the most untethered moment on Eusexua is just a spelling error on the lyric sheet. It happens during Drums of Death, a song densely populated with booming stutters that vaguely echo the early-aughties sound of Ellen Allien’s techno label BPitch Control. Over these concussive glitches, Twigs sings about her desire more vividly than before, describing it as “ravid”. Ravid.

Is it a typo? Tough to imagine an artist as meticulous as Twigs making that kind of flub, so in the spirit of Eusexua, let’s embrace “ravid” – “rabid,” “ravishing”, “ravey”, “raving” – as both an expression of the inexpressible and a gesture towards the future. If Eusexua really is some kind of pinnacle, some height, some mountaintop, who wouldn’t want to follow this woman down into the valley of the ravid and beyond?

More on music

The artists we’re pressing play on

Rising star Olivia Dean is ready to come to Aotearoa. Laneway artist Olivia Dean is a musical powerhouse whose moving lyrics and soulful melodies resonate deeply with fans around the world.

As Charli XCX ascends, ‘Brat’ summer is a lesson in hype literacy. You’ve seen the memes, the merch, the political endorsements. Check out the album, too.

Singing about body image is a pop taboo. New York Times’ Lindsay Zoladz considers the stars singing about a long-stigmatised subject.

Like her music, Sabrina Carpenter is gloriously sly and merciless. Young romance is all sexy fun and games – until it’s not.