There’s no shame in describing the deepest of pleasures in simple language: “It feels nice,” FKA twigs declares on ‘Room of Fools’, a highlight off her third album EUSEXUA, while another track is called ‘Girl Feels Good’. But the pop iconoclast is as gifted at putting things succinctly as she is at nuanced expression of both body and soul, which is why she’s spent so much of the album’s rollout trying to describe the word she coined for it. The record may not be as loose as her 2022 mixtape CAPRISONGS, but certainly retains some of its clubby exuberance, as well as the spell-binding eroticism of LP1, in mapping that slippery state of being. That it’s a place worth exploring goes without saying.
1. Eusexua
FKA twigs’ press campaign for EUSEXUA seemed to be as much about promoting an album as it was about vaguely defining the newly coined word it’s named after. “Eusexua is a practice. Eusexua is a state of being. Eusexua is the pinnacle of human experience,” The title card of the video for the the title track reads. But in the song itself, she not only acknowledges that the feeling goes beyond semantics but locates it in the body: “Words cannot describe, baby/ This feeling deep inside.” Yet twigs offers no easy path towards this transcendence, skirting around the edges and teasing the listener into it while conveying its shapeshifting, time-bending power. Then she cooly lifts the track off the ground, a rush equivalent to love – just make sure not to call it that.
2. Girl Feels Good
After introducing the elusive state of eusexua, twigs relays pleasure in more simple terms: “When a girl feels good, you’ll know.” She reinforces the timelessness of that principle by empliying a synth that recalls Madonna’s Ray of Light, and it’s the first song to give Eusexua a proper bounce.
3. Perfect Stranger
twigs moves on to the thrill of sexual anonymity on ‘Perfect Stranger’, which is even clubbier and more straightforward than the previous track – by twigs’ pop standards, at least. It’s one way of getting across her message and playful sense of humour – when it comes to star signs and half-finished degrees, she makes clear from the outset, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” She’s no stranger to making direct but never anonymous pop, and like the song’s nameless object of desire, it’s hard to resist.
4. Drums of Death
The thumping beat at the end of ‘Perfect Stranger’ booms out on ‘Drums of Death’, which flaunts twigs’ penchant for left-field production. Glitched-up and industrial, the instrumental was first made while Koreless – who gets a proper feature here – was on a flight to Berlin to perform at Berghain, and for twigs,it’s the perfect opportunity to indulge in the line between desire and violence. Rather than just an oddity, the song instantly leaps out as a highlight on the album and one of the most stellar songs in twigs’ catalog.
5. Room of Fools
The song directly picks up the thread from ‘Perfect Stranger’, this time likening twigs’ fellow partygoers to fools and stray dogs while taking cues from Kate Bush and Björk. It’s a liberating kind of hunger, insatiable as it may be; twigs is “just bleeding out the pleasure,” fashioning bliss and even beauty out of the shared vulnerability of the dancefloor.
6. Sticky
Right after singing about emotional wounds, twigs opens one up with the album’s first ballad, one whose piano melody is reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s ‘Avril 14th’. The lyrics are disarming at first – “I tried to fuck you with the lights on/ In the hope you’d think I’m open and have a conversation” – but the intimacy of twigs’ voice is as approachable as it is expressive. As she yearns to be known in the deepest places, and as if to dissolve the pain sitting in her body, the song contorts itself out of this delicate state at the very end, distorting the titular word to show exactly how it feels.
7. Keep It, Hold It
Keeping things minimal, the track questions what to do with all that internal disarray: its title may seem to offer a clear answer, a kind of emotional suppression that’s mirrored by its intricately hushed group vocals. But any sense of quietude is disrupted when a stomping beat enters the mix; ‘Keep It, Hold It’ thrives on the tension as much as the release, even if the latter is only a passing thought.
8. Childlike Things [feat. North West]
EUSEXUA jolts itself back up with ‘Childlike Things’, another purely catchy song whose most surprising feature is North West delivering a verse in Japanese. Not a dull moment, exactly, but a bit of a headscratcher.
9. Striptease
Equipped with a tantalizing melody that twigs bends to her will, ‘Striptease’ is one of the album’s most dynamic offerings. It has to b – twigs is left with no choice but to parallelize physical intimacy and personal soul-baring, her voice breaking itself open during the choruses. As in previous songs, twigs treats the song’s final minute or so as a kind of sonic playground, this time carrying the song out with a hypnotic drum and bass beat.
10. 24h Dog
Here twigs trades feelings of guilt for total submission, something the song revels in as much as the true self-acceptance it requires. Maybe more than any song on the album, you can hear twigs giving into her deepest desires more than simply wanting to, enchanting the listener with a cocktail of gleaming synths, tickling percussion, and some of the album’s most impressive vocalizations.
11. Wanderlust
The concept of eusexua may suggest the perfect marriage of mind and body, but the album’s final track finds twigs retreating into one of those halves: “I’ll be in my head if you need me.” It’s the most tender and down-to-earth track on the album, enough to make you wonder how esoteric this whole experience has been, but it’s not quite downcast. The lyrics may lean on a few cliches (“You’ve one life to live, do it freely”), but when she delivers them with such breathtaking candor, it’s a good pitch. Feeling a little lost, she suggests, is just one way of knowing you’re living through it.