Label: XL Recordings
Released: 24th January 2025
FKA twigs has always treated genre boundaries like a cat treats closed doors – something to be elegantly ignored while establishing dominance. On ‘Eusexua’, she’s not just pushing those boundaries; she’s screaming the house down as she claws them open. It’s a record that sounds like sending a raw confessional through a confetti cannon – messy, beautiful, and heralded with a bang.
The title-track arrives like a heartbeat having an existential crisis, morphing from biological rhythm to techno pulse with the kind of confidence that makes you wonder why anyone bothers keeping these sounds separate. Twigs floats above it all like a benevolent club angel, introducing us to her concept of “eusexua” – a Prague-born fusion of euphoria and sexuality that manages to sound both incredibly pretentious and absolutely essential. It’s a trick that most may allow to get stuck in the mud of its own artistic statement, but Twigs knows how to engage and inform in a way so few others do.
‘Girl Feels Good’ emerges from the mist like Madonna’s ‘Ray of Light’ reborn in a basement club, all shimmering synths and divine energy cranked up to eleven. Meanwhile, ‘Perfect Stranger’ transforms a casual encounter into the kind of pop-garage anthem that makes bad decisions feel like a spiritual awakening – it’s essentially a 3am text to your ex turned into high art.
Not every experiment lands with quite the same tonal precision. ‘Childlike Things’ featuring North West (yes, that North West – in Japanese, no less!) feels like accidentally walking into a children’s party at a Berlin techno club. It’s fascinating but somewhat unsettling – yet undeniably infectious and, yes, utterly brilliant. ‘Striptease’ and ‘Drums of Death’ chase chaos with the enthusiasm of a sugar-rushed toddler, resulting in something that’s more interesting than accessible to the masses – like abstract art you admire but isn’t ever intended to hang in the living room.
But when ‘Eusexua’ connects, it’s nothing short of transcendent. ‘Room of Fools’ captures the sacred communion of the dancefloor with the precision of a war photographer shooting a peace treaty, while ‘Wanderlust’ closes the album like the best kind of sunrise – equal parts melancholy and hope, walking home as the birds start singing. ‘Eusexua’ isn’t a perfect record, but perfection was never the point. It’s an indecent proposal to liberation written in sweat and strobe lights, cementing twigs’ position as pop’s most committed artistic maverick. In a world of ordered algorithms, she’s chosen beautiful disorder – and honestly, the view from here is spectacular.
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