FKA twigs has made it clear that her unbridled imagination doesn’t always translate to a conventional rollout. We may live in a time when artists can retroactively remove songs from an album simply because it’s more how they want them to be (while needing to clarify the changes only apply to digital media), but one could accuse the shapeshifting iconoclast of taking her world-building too far with EUSEXUA, which was reimagined the same day it was expanded with a brand new album. Yet you can tell twigs’ strategy stems not from perfectionism or a mere desire for post-release tinkering (which most artists would share), but genuine enthusiasm for the project and its malleability. That extends to EUSEXUA Afterglow, which doesn’t dim so much as continue to ride the high of the original, sticking to the concept while borrowing some of the looseness of CAPRISONGS. It’s hard to imagine coming out of it and wishing it were just another deluxe album.
1. Love Crimes
‘Love Crimes’ immediately undercuts the expectation that EUSEXUA Afterglow will be a moodier companion to the original. “My heart keeps falling/ Harder than before,” twigs announces, proving her point with a pummeling four-on-the-floor beat. Flexed and contorted by a body “like a death trap,” the singer isn’t quite ready to let go. But the imperative to let them know pulses just as hard.
2. Slushy
Amidst a spiralling world, twigs proclaims, “I’m gonna make today heavenly.” ‘Slushy’ doesn’t feel like she’s manifesting it; it dizzies and wonders, restoring memories from the Recycle Bin and, in its more wakeful form, reaching for a hand to hold. You start to get what the Afterglow is all about.
3. Wild and Alone [feat. PinkPantheress]
Buried in the wafting loneliness that pervades EUSEXUA Afterglow’s first few songs is an almost domestic kind of warmth. In ‘Slushy’, twigs extols the pleasures of “waking up with you kinda late Saturday,” and here we find her waking up “tired, cute, and okay/ ‘Cause I love it when you call me/ And we talk all night.” But the overpowering feelings are the titular ones, capturing the absurd push-and-pull of fame while also finding the humour in it: “I think that being famous is funny.” PinkPantheress meets her right where she’s at.
4. HARD
The all-caps title tells you something about the switch in intensity here, dialed up with help from German producer Mechatok. It shakes and skitters at the thought of discovering the other person’s capacity for total surrender, a match of physical freedom. There’s no touching or even the rush to get there, just the pure ecstasy of anticipation and chemistry, the kind that easily flips into nervousness.
5. Cheap Hotel
Halfway through the track, twigs and her co-producers – including Two Shell – deconstruct its trip-hop beat to suggest that the singer’s invitation to “room twenty or twenty four,” the allure of “endless summertime,” has been accepted. It’s the moment tantalizing fantasy is starting to take shape in the real world, which simultaneously can seem amorphous, bogged down by the depth of the night. Still, the offer stands.
6. Touch a Girl
Musically, the song drifts in a kind of vacuous haze, but lyrically it’s among the album’s most compelling tracks, lending it its title: “Hurt so good that I got that afterglow.” The intersection of pleasure and pain has always been gold for twigs’ music – ‘Touch a Girl’ (as in “You don’t know how…”) is more accusatory than instructing, mirroring the deflation of possibility.
7. Predictable Girl
Less effective than the previous Mechatok collab, ‘Predictable Girl’ is still tellingly abrasive in its production, which is almost as jarring as some of its lyrics (“You made up a world, then got fucked in the ass”). It’s as if the ‘Promiscuous’ nod is so obvious they had to chop and distort it to death, though it also acts as a convincing expression of getting lost in your head. Somewhere along the way, it loses Afterglow’s most cogent pop song.
8. Sushi
By twigs’ standards, ‘Sushi’ feels run-of-the-mill and clumsily written, endearing as its insistence on taking her lover out might be. “And no, I still can’t drive/ But me and my sassy friends can pick you up/ Treat you fancy nice,” she sings, but cheap sounded better just a few songs earlier. The segue into NYC ballroom homage is enticing, but by that point, the song has somewhat overstayed its welcome.
9. Piece of Mine
Over tenderly and familiarly sensual production, twigs finally offers her instructions: “Lay back and recline”; “Follow the signs/ ‘Cause it’s a long ride, baby.” It harks back to LP1 in a way that allows twigs to relax into her vibrato, creating a safe space. Riding a high has rarely sounded so simple.
10. Lost All My Friends
The album’s penultimate track finds twigs at a point of desperation where memory starts to slip and there’s a whiff of danger in the air, except it’s no longer fun. The same drug – literally or metaphorically – that loosened the senses on ‘Cheap Hotel’ now just breeds anxiety. As twigs flits between the cathartic highs and shadowy lows of her voice, effected as it is, ‘Lost All My Friends’ earns its climactic placement.
11. Stereo Boy
EUSEXUA Afterglow leaves its most breathtaking moment for last. The hook – which is typically all an FKA twigs ballad really needs – is an emotional gut punch: “I changed the station, but my pain, it still remained/ ‘Cause you’re just a stereo boy,” she sings over glitched-out shoegaze, hopefully a sound twigs keeps harnessing. Sometimes the pain never gets converted and the pleasure’s lost in the static. No matter where the album finds you, though – securely attached or unrequitedly yearning – it’s hard not to be drawn by its ever-evolving frequencies.
