FKA twigs’s debut album, 2014’s LP1, wasn’t a total reinvention of R&B as much as it was a sensory-driven variation on the genre, with an ear toward British electronic music—primarily dub, glitch, and U.K. bass. twigs is a detail-oriented soundscaper and consummate singer who makes compelling left-of-center pop music, regardless of notions of trailblazing. In that sense, her latest album, Eusexua, continually reminds you of LP1.
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. On “Sticky,” twigs sings, “I tried to fuck you with the lights on/In the hope you’d think I’m open,” a call-back to “Lights On.”
The artist’s new preoccupations, still presented with an angsty yearning, are all over Eusexua. The album’s concept is purportedly about transcending one’s human form, of experiencing a “feeling deep inside…words cannot describe,” as she sings on the title track. Which is interesting considering twigs’s music, elsewhere and especially here, is so rooted in the body.
On “Striptease,” twigs—a gifted dancer—sings in an almost shockingly mush-mouthed cadence about her “arched spine…eyes [and] sternum stretched wide.” The way her vocals soar and drag against the track’s closing twitchy breakbeats recall her closest peer in R&B-electronic fusion: Kelela, someone also interested in the relationship between beats and body.
Multiple songs on Eusexua ruminate on the pleasures of getting lost on the dance floor and tapping into one’s physical urges. “Room of Fools” balances a certain disdain for twigs’s fellow “stray dogs,” or partygoers, with a tribute to the communion of excess and vulnerability the space provides: “Just bleeding out the pleasure…we make something nice together.” The song’s beat likewise threads bass that rumbles like a hungry animal with a brighter, bouncy synth.
After twigs’s first few projects obsessively catalogued the pains of codependence and stasis, Eusexua presents someone learning to find strength in near-constant movement: “Keep It, Hold It” sees her putting one foot over the other as a means of survival while trying to hold close what’s dear and protect it with all her power. Perhaps this gesture is one of protection against intrusive and abusive men, and this album finds her both focusing on herself and taking refuge in trysts with people she doesn’t—nor cares to—know.
“Perfect Stranger” is a 2-step garage tune on which twigs relishes not knowing “the name of the town you’re from, your star sign or the school you failed,” because if she did, they’d probably end up lying to her. “You’re the best and you deserve it/You’re a stranger so you’re perfect,” she coos. It’s a cheeky line that she plays totally deadpan, which points to the broader limitation of twigs’s work: Despite her sometimes impassioned emoting, her voice can feel chilly or trapped beneath glass. Any trace of the Caprisongs’s warmth or Magdalene’s melodrama is absent here.
The breezy “Girl Feels Good” is an ode to the simplicity of female pleasure whose sonic palette falls somewhere between Madonna’s Ray of Light and that Dust Brothers song from the opening credits of David Fincher’s Fight Club. And the kaleidoscopic vocal shards and low-key moodiness of “Sticky” are reminiscent of Flume. But it’s a credit to twigs’s singular vision that she largely manages to synthesize all of these reference points.
“Wanderlust,” Eusexua’s final track, typifies this with its circuitous, ouroboros nature. The song’s concept is corny, but twigs belts it out beautifully and serves up a haunting refrain: “If I don’t wake up Monday morning, I’ll make it up to you, babe.” Nothing could be more twigs than that: fatalism, virtues, and missteps that cancel each other out, all with exceptional style.
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