EUSEXUA

Eusexua demands both surrender and celebration; it doesn't just embrace the thrust of commercial dance, it subsumes it into the chromatic, honed prism of twigs' artistry.

Twigs has successfully shown that the connection of music, movement, mind, soul and body can be converted into sound, weaving these elements into a cohesive and transcendent artistic experience. She brings her own assured sense of creativity and spirituality and combines it with her ability to materialise the intangible.

Challenging but focused, “Eusexua” cements Twigs’ status as one of music’s great innovators.

Once again, as she did on Magdalene, she’s let those competing ideas fuel a cathartic transformation.

On a fundamental level, the bangers on EUSEXUA bang like once and future bangers.

It’s a conceptual masterpiece that speaks to the heart and the head, the spirit and the body, reminding us that these things are not nearly as separate as some would have us believe.

In anchoring her songwriting in the canon of '90s dance music, twigs shines with a quality we haven't really seen before. Eusexua is remarkably slippery, allowing songs to go anywhere and do anything, but propelled by the prowess of a songwriter in peak form.

FKA twigs has guided listeners through a remarkably honest song cycle. The complexities are where her music thrives, and EUSEXUA abounds with them.

As long-term fans are treated to a new classic that can both match and expand on the greatness of her previous work, new fans will be treated to her genius at its most accessible.

Excellent. .... The single guest vocal comes on the album’s only misfire ‘Childlike Things’, which bizarrely features vocals from North West, the eleven-year old daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who contributes a rap in English and Japanese. With its sing-song chorus, brattish chanting and self-consciously zany lyrics (“Like a chocolate teapot / Melt ‘em down and burn ‘em up”) it sticks out on an otherwise sophisticated album, and is just plain annoying.

Interlaced with songs of celebratory surrender are darker tracks that delve into anxiety and neurosis, and these are the most powerful. [Apr 2025, p.83]

[“Childlike Things”] is fun, nonsensical and diametrically opposed to the song following it on the album, “Striptease,” but that’s okay, because twigs sells everything she does with an impenetrable confidence. Like most of EUSEXUA, this is music you have to sweat out.

Where twigs’s debut moved like molasses, though, Eusexua is mostly a briskly paced techno album. It’s propulsive and fun, but, like LP1, it’s wrapped in anguish.

It’s defiantly weird, rawly explicit; at times, it does wander around in vague search of melodies. But it’s also a gorgeous grower of an album that blossoms with different details each time you hear it. The overcomplications and stickiness are part of its prettiness.

They sometimes leave an uncatered desire for more lyrical depth. In several cases, however, the electrifying music makes up for what’s unfulfilled.

Eusexua is one of those instances writ large, where gnarly electronics – in collaboration with producer Koreless – remind you of her outsider status while the tunes sing out.

The joy of Eusexua is not so much its oversexed content as its alien sounds, incorporating elements of acoustic balladry, industrial rock, ambient soundscapes, moody trip-hop (one of her co-producers is Marius de Vries who has worked with Bjork and Bowie) and shimmery electropop (on Like A Girl and Perfect Stranger, Twigs evokes Madonna and Kylie Minogue at their most sparkling).

On Eusexua, though, the focus is complete freedom and impulse. She recharges and transforms, becoming stronger and at times even unrecognizable. Hearing such a transformation is all the more powerful, given how vulnerable she’s been in the past.

Crisp, direct pop songwriting is one more discipline for FKA twigs to learn, one more expressive avenue to explore, one more bold momentary costume. “Eusexua” tests how much she can remain herself within pop’s constraints. The answer: quite a bit.

Where Magdalene found itself virtually overburdened by its own emotional weight, this album is almost ponderously short of it, yet malleable and playful in a way that vindicates its escapist bent.

While Eusexua is undeniably a well-assembled pop album, it’s one that would have benefitted from a bit more fun, a bit more mess. It’s an album about surrender but filtered through a single individual, forward-gesturing but incredibly of the moment.