On the defiantly weird Eusexua, FKA twigs reaches for new, oddity-embracing shapes
“I’m tired of messing up my life with overcomplicated moments and sticky situations,” whispers FKA twigs halfway through her third album, Eusexua. It’s an intimate confession, delivered as though the 37-year-old’s lips are brushing against the mic. Throughout the record, the artist born Tahliah Barnett enunciates clearly in a sweet, breathy voice that shivers as she reaches for the top-shelf notes over a dialled-down bed of house beats, delicate synths and shimmering harps.
Listening to it is like being granted telepathic access to the drifting thoughts of a dancer in a club. Unsurprising, when you learn that twigs says the concept of this album was born from the rave scene in Prague. She claims to have scribbled the word “Eusexua” (combining sexuality and euphoria) on the back of her hand in a club toilet, along with the thought: “In this room of fools WE MAKE SOMETHING TOGETHER.”
So while she sometimes addresses individuals, she also seems to invite a communal trance. On the title track, the beat races like a thready pulse, low in the mix, as she asks: “Do you feel alone?/ You’re not alone.” In a recent interview, she explained how she wanted to explore our increasing addiction to technology. She came up with an 11-step “healing programme” that apparently involves “a lot of gyrating and shaking … it’s an incredibly raw and primal movement”.
A classically trained dancer – working professionally from the age of 12 – twigs has come to despise the rules around music. The supple, experimental warping of beats, tones and song structures here sees her reaching for new, oddity-embracing shapes. As a co-producer on Eusexua, she found herself pushing for a more feminine sound – or in her own words, “more p***y”.
While certainly not mainstream, twigs’s music could find its home on freakier dancefloors. With its steady beat and warm waves of Balearic guitar, “Girl Feels Good” comes with echoes of Madonna’s 1998 “Ray of Light”. It also feels like the ideological descendent of the Material Girl’s erotically charged attitude. “Perfect Stranger” (a nod to Madonna’s “Beautiful Stranger”?) floats over an insistent 4/4 beat, as twigs eloquently conjures the allure of an anonymous encounter: “I don’t know your friends or your ex’s name/ Who left who or who took the blame/ I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“Drums of Death” is a grittier, grimier proposition. The vocals glitch and twitch their way through the crowded electronic percussion. “Hard metal silver stiletto” twigs intones. “Crash the system, diva doll”. She’s the dominant lover here, ordering: “Serve c***.” But then she flips the script on “24hr Dog”, submitting to a dreamy haze of layered vocals and muted electronica. These murkier moments allow her to break through into sugar-rush flushes of chunky major synth chords, as on “Room of Fools” where she giddily exclaims, rather Björkishly: “It feels nice!”
I’ll be curious to see if Eusexua gets any radio play. It’s defiantly weird, rawly explicit; at times, it does wander around in vague search of melodies. But it’s also a gorgeous grower of an album that blossoms with different details each time you hear it. The overcomplications and stickiness are part of its prettiness.
