Feel, don’t think – break out of the corporate nightmare and live by Eusexua.
9.0
Credit: Young
Once a biographer with her music, Twigs now asks the listener to link their lived experience with her rave-ready third LP.
There’s an in-between world that exists whilst inebriated on a dancefloor. It comes in flashes – the brief seconds when consciousness lets go of its surroundings and your emotions catch up with you. Everyone brings their week with them on a night-out, and sometimes it takes until 2am to truly be free from your shit.
More so than ever, when even a walk down the street is an assault by advertisement, the need to break out of the corporate nightmare has become a necessity. Pour one out too for all of our comrades in jobs that use business software with names like ‘Zoho’ and ‘Quixy’. I’m ready to man the barricade against Monday.com myself.
Techno feudalism needs its rebellion. This isn’t it – Twigs is too ethereal and angelic to engage with politics, so she seeks release from reality for solace. Lest we forget that the mental consequences of the times we live in makes us all casualties. Weekend escapism in warehouse raves and dry-iced dancefloors are an antidote to the malignant forces of marketing, and their claws rarely find passage to them.
“…Twigs is an artist blessed with rare powers to articulate the inarticulable, having wielded it across her discography to describe the feelings of sex, body and love that language hasn’t quite found words for.”
Then again, that doesn’t stop this from being her most complete statement yet. A moodboard of browns, earth tones and leather, clothed in Alexander McQueen, futuristic jewelry and outright nudity. Eusexua’s concept is laid out in its own dedicated manifestation, as artsy and grandiose as she’s ever been. Hold back on any accusations of pretentiousness and see it for the cipher that it is – feel, don’t think. Alleviate yourself of the confines of a material world and embrace the flowstate.
In much the same way, this should not be seen as a ‘rave’ album, but rather a lexicon. Though she is joining Pop’s broader push against the slide into techno feudalism, Twigs is an artist blessed with rare powers to articulate the inarticulable, having wielded it across her discography to describe the feelings of sex, body and love that language hasn’t quite found words for.
Her talent now takes on the nocturnal land of the dancefloor, engaging with something beyond just its usual facets of euphoria and dousing its emotional space in new light. Twigs in this way becomes the conduit between worlds, the album gradually revealing that its end result is less about iconographying its own concept and instead realising a lived experience.
“Elements are blended under her indelible mark of movement, every song flowing as though it were a routine.”
Should dance music be so intellectual? There’s ‘Intelligent’ Dance Music of course, which gets it nod on the wintery Aphex Twin-esque piano of ‘Sticky’. Eusexua, however, pulls its influences from the full breadth of the genre, far beyond the trance fascia of its lead singles. Collaborating with Welsh DJ and producer Koreless, who’s credentials for being on the pulse of where club sounds are heading are second to none, has unlocked a new, fast-paced side to the Twigs we know.
Her experimental side, meanwhile, remains untampered, rarely sticking to one genre per cut. Elements are blended under her indelible mark of movement, every song flowing as though it were a routine. Criticism in certain insular online music circles about her co-opting other scenes conveniently ignores the fact that Twigs has always been in the dance space, music video after music video filled with jaw-dropping choreography.
Which in turn ensures that this album is the next artistic evolution of FKA twigs, and not a cash grab for a trend. After the years of emotional strife she had suffered in her personal life, how could the freedom of the club not be the place to rediscover yourself in? The fact that all of this was birthed from the warehouse raves of Prague she went to whilst filming The Crow (a discussion for another day) plants Eusexua’s roots firmly out of passion and expression.
But where it connects to her discography is interesting. Ironically, despite its sonic palette – on paper – being the most accessible work she’s made as of yet, Eusexua might be the hardest album of hers to engage with. Despite how sharp and avant-garde her releases have been up to this point, the move away from a singular sound recharacterises Twigs from an artist banking on her shere abstractness leaving you speechless, to a being going through metamorphosis. I welcome it fully; the physicality of her alien qualities have broken the third dimension, and now she brandishes her entrapments upon the psychological realm.
“‘Room of Fools’ feels like Kate Bush on mandy, rollicking guitars driving its pulsating beat,…”
Hence, how far you read into the record is determined by how loudly you fancy playing it; trust the ‘feel, don’t think’ attitude. On those opening six cuts, new career highs are achieved. Lord knows I’ve already sunk countless listens into its title track since it first exploded into the open last September, and it rightfully earned the #2 spot on the Sourhouse Tunes of the Year 2024.
Fan favourite ‘Girl Feels Good’ is full Madonna Ray Of Light fare, unapologetically so, Twig’s vocals left untouched on the chorus to bring slick warmness to the album’s opening act. Second single ‘Perfect Stranger’ is resonant and addictive, every melody equal parts affirming and catchy, before that drop comes to blow out the final 30 seconds. ‘Room of Fools’ feels like Kate Bush on mandy, rollicking guitars driving its pulsating beat, recreating the unsettling vocal layerings of her output on The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love.
Comparisons to Björk across the record, meanwhile, are more than warranted, and with the change in her approach, do not feel like a step back from having to reinvent the wheel with every release. Nor does she leave her established sound altogether, either. The final three cuts are perhaps a necessary anchor to her past work, the first time she has included real callbacks in her discography, and her more familiar stylings flourish under the new treatment she gives them.
‘Striptease’, the one track here that refuses to leave my tongue, proves that Trap Twigs is alive and well. Devastating in its form, with huge surges of sounds that throttle at the whim of that commanding beat, all worshiping at the base of that razor-shredding chorus. Watch the video too, I beg, and understand why fans are calling this “biblically-accurate Twigs”. ‘24hr Dog’ offers the record’s most intimate moment, a link to the heartbreak of Magdalene, fuelled by an aching sense of obedience and longing. ‘Wanderlust’ may as well be a liner note, something that breaks too much with the rest of the record with its spoken word quality, but which is delivered with an urgency.
“… Eusexua is an expression of the in-between, a testament to its necessity when the technocratic corporate hell-hole we live in maims our emotive needs.”
So exceptional and recondite is Twigs that some will have placed expectation on her to yet again define a futuristic, unheard-of sound. Doing so up to now, however, has required the trade off of pouring her soul out. There’s only so much to reveal, and there’s only so much energy one can demand of an artist to give in speaking their emotions.
Thus, Eusexua asks the listener to contribute by tasking itself with painting a picture of a higher dimension. One that all those of dancefloor persuasion have no doubt felt. The emotional toll of the past 5 years of her life underlays the album, but no longer does she treat her music as solely a biographical endeavour of self exploration. On Eusexua, Twigs speaks directly to the listener, connecting the dance sounds she knows you love just as much as she does with your own lived experiences.
Like the dissassociations you get when you briefly phase out at the rave, or the way time vanishes in the entrancement of music, love and substances, Eusexua is an expression of the in-between, a testament to its necessity when the technocratic corporate hell-hole we live in maims our emotive needs. In the video for the title track, the imprisoning world of office culture and digital services that have too many vowels in their name quite literally breaks at the seams, revealing an emboldened nakedness and a thumping beat to pump to.
Evolving from the qualities she is synonymous for and naturally asking ‘what’s next?’, Eusexua finds its footing in a dedication to all the sounds that have brought us to the dancefloor, applying her infallible articulations of sex and body in new territory. Movement has always been fundamental to completing her audio-visual explorations, but here, the art dedicates deliberate space for what its listeners bring. Your lived experience is the final brushstroke.
Break out of the corporate nightmare. Alleviate yourself of what drags your weeks down. Make everything in your wardrobe brown and rave-ready. Get a fucking skullet. Live by the concept of Eusexua.
Score: 9.0/10
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