FKA Twigs – Eusexua Review

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FKA Twigs’ Eusexua begins with the promise of a new sound. This sense of exploring an accessible but interesting sub-genre which has influenced Twigs in one way or another. Her lead single suggested as much but the album has a whole other intent. An influence from the raves of Prague has led to little more than a few footnotes of its sound on an album which, ultimately, cannot reflect the experience. It was a tough ask to begin with but the wholly different style, the fundamental changes between what is experienced and what is delivered, is a chasm. There is a performative sense to Eusexua, so necessary yet equally overblown now the rest of the tracks are available. What sounds like entering into some hidden club, someplace where the mind will open up to new experiences, is what dance genre fans will have heard time and again. FKA Twigs cannot stick the landing of those leftfield innovations.  

Very soft tones of club-adjacent experimentation are found on Eusexua. Its title track remains magnificent, but follow-up Girl Feels Good is the space-age-styled and messy mix you would expect from the soundtrack filler of a Paul W. S. Anderson Resident Evil adaptation. Relatively enjoyable but the promise of a new depth, a reliance on the bold tones of a genre as yet unheard, becomes a nostalgia pop. No use comes from comparing one artist to another, but it is hard not to hear the flickers of relatively plain pop music in Perfect Stranger. Those beats and tempo choices, the echo of not caring paired with the pangs of hate in the face of love, are so underwhelming. Borderline disappointing, but held together by an often reactive and well-rounded vocal performance, a lyrical slice which remains a highlight of Twigs’ talents. A shame about the instrumentals, though, they strip away what could have made Eusexua the standout dance album of the year.  

Glitch pop efforts like Drums of Death hear Twigs head back to the touted Prague influence but she rarely returns to it after this. It is not the loss of a genre fixation which hurts most with Eusexua, it is the slack occasion, the relatively thin feel of its alleged emotive core. This is not to say Eusexua is not great fun. It is. Room of Fools is a scattershot of soft jazz, of exemplary club tones and a maddening vocal performance which grips the very purpose of electronic music and shakes it loose. If there were more of it, more of this daring tone to go around, it would mark Twigs’ finest work. Lyrically these are the inevitably defiant moments which pair so well with electronic music, with EDM structure and pursuits of a higher and higher BPM. Keep It, Hold It, experiments with this best of all, in seeing where a tone and structure can shift.  

Yet these experimental moments have been carried out for decades and it is not as though Twigs can find a new route through. Even with those allusions to dance scenes in the Czech Republic, nothing about Eusexua stands out as anything more than relatively thrilling beats which are fun while they last though not leaving too much of an impression. Childlike Things may suggest supersonic powers in North West and Twigs’ possession, though neither shows any sign of using them on Eusexua. Its experimental club fixation must be praised, that is for certain. Tracks like Striptease have such a volatility to them that, at the very least, Twigs is pushing for some non-descript sense of euphoria to come from the thrill of movement, from the spills taken on the dancefloor. A mess of an album, but in a sense, is launching yourself around a sticky-floored club not equally as strewn?