FKA twigs defines EUSEXUA, not just the title of her long awaited third album but a whole philosophy for life itself, as “beauty and awe in the moment of heightened human experience”. She hopes people who really connect to the concept will take away “a sense of freedom…liberation”. EUSEXUA, she says, “feels like a matter of survival”.
You can see why she would feel this way. Twigs knows more acutely than most that the female body is where misogyny’s most fundamental battles are fought, the ultimate location of women’s exploitation and emancipation. Her body, she has said, “has overcome more pain than you can imagine”. That pain has been well documented in the same media and has arguably overshadowed her exceptional abilities and accomplishments as an artist. Those who have never listened to a second of her music will nevertheless be familiar with her trauma.
A unique embodied sensuality
First there was the ongoing, vicious racist abuse she experienced from fans of the Hollywood actor Robert Pattinson whilst twigs was dating and later engaged to him. The disturbing logic seemed to be that as a Black woman, twigs should not have the audacity to date an eligible and powerful white man. Twigs processed some of her pain on her lauded second album, MAGDALENE. Then there was Shia LaBoeuf, whom she has been attempting to sue since 2020 for a litany of abusive behaviour towards her during their short relationship. This includes coercive control, physical violence and knowingly infecting her with a life-altering, incurable sexually transmitted disease. The case is set to finally go to trial towards the end of this year. All this has cast twigs as the tragic celebrity girlfriend in the media. She has become used to being trailed by the paparazzi, being “constantly watched and scrutinised”, her most intimate details combed over for ghoulish entertainment.
Twigs has long resisted being labelled as a victim, campaigning for women’s bodily freedom years before she conceived EUSEXUA. During the Pandemic, she launched a fundraiser for sex workers and supported a UK campaign calling on the government to decriminalise sex work. She also spoke publicly about her own experiences as a sex worker – one of the very few female celebrities to do so – saying her experiences had helped make her a “strong and formidable woman” as well as influenced her art. She showed the same strength when she fought a judgement by the UK Advertising Standards Agency which ruled that a semi-nude image of her she approved for a Calvin Klein campaign depicted her as a “stereotypical sexual object”. Once again, she found her body made public property, subject to judgement and control by others. She appealed the judgement and won, drawing comparisons between her art and visionary women such as Grace Jones who “broke down barriers of what it looks like to be empowered and harness a unique embodied sensuality… I will not have my narrative changed.”
A strong narrative certainly underpins EUSEXUA. The album was born during time twigs spent in Prague in the wake of the Pandemic, where she could be truly anonymous. She revelled in the freedom of being able to be spontaneous and, she says, reconnected to visceral memories of her body (she originally trained as a dancer, turning professional at the age of twelve) and the relationship she had had to it in the past. She fell in love with Prague’s queer club scene, taking inspiration for the eleven songs that would eventually become EUSEXUA from the tracks she danced to there. It is a joyful album, leaning further into the mood she explored on 2022’s hip-hop and garage-inspired mixtape CAPRISONGS.
A powerful and dangerous concept
EUSEXUA will inevitably be compared to Charli xcx’s culture-defining „Brat“, and there are similarities. Both albums are love letters to dance music; both explore the transcendence to be found on the dancefloor. Both have, if not entirely invented then certainly reshaped the popular understanding of a word. However, EUSEXUA differs from Brat in locating transcendence in the physical body, rather than the hedonism of the clubbing lifestyle. Each of the eleven songs has a physical movement, or “pillar”, associated with it, which combine into what twigs calls a “11-step somatic healing programme” which is “raw and primal”.
Some will already be rolling their eyes, and it’s true you don’t need to embrace the concept or know any of the context surrounding twigs to appreciate EUSEXUA as simply a fantastic collection of dance tracks. But the context is vital in order to understand that EUSEXUA as a philosophy is coming from a very different place than, say, the Goop wellness empire built by Gwyneth Paltrow. We’re living in a time when women challenge themselves to have sex, on camera, with a hundred, a thousand men, when women’s experience of sex is still, too often, all outward performance and very little actual pleasure, when brutal body-altering procedures and surgeries are sold to all women as normal.
The message is clear: your body is for others to objectify, not for your own enjoyment. As women, we may never have been more alienated from our own bodies than we currently are. Imagine the revolution EUSEXUA could bring about, if women refused to perform and instead pursued the highest forms of bodily pleasure, for themselves? It’s difficult not to agree with twigs’ claim that EUSEXUA is “a powerful and dangerous concept”.
EUSEXUA would, of course, fall flat if the music wasn’t so good. Each song feels a bit like the musical equivalent of gazing at a beautiful glass sculpture, each track exemplifying precision-honed beats, immaculate production and the soaring, operatic vocals so unique to twigs. She has spoken about her love of music from the early 90s, name-checking the 1992 Shakespear’s Sister classic “Stay” as one of her favourite songs. It seems a left-field choice until you listen to EUSEXUA and hear that distinctive two-part, contrasting structure in so many of the tracks here. Twigs likes to wrong-foot the listener: a slow-paced melody will suddenly break down into a frantic techno beat, such as on “Keep It, Hold It”, or a song will start in one place and finish in entirely another.
“When a girl feels good, it makes the world go round”
The first two singles released – the techno-infused title track and “Perfect Stranger” – would hold their own on the dancefloor of any queer superclub. Elsewhere, twigs shows she can do pop that recalls Ray of Light-era Madonna on the anthemic “Girl Feels Good” (“When a girl feels good, it makes the world go round”), “Striptease” and “Wanderlust”. She knows she could pivot to pop full-time and give many of today’s chart-toppers a run for their money if she really felt the inclination. Then again, she’s too talented at a stellar electronic track, such as the startling, industrial-sounding “Drums of Death” with its distorted vocal that ends with a call to “Serve c**t, serve violence”.
“Sticky” starts off slow, all piano and falsetto vocal, erupting into grinding, distorted bass, twigs singing “I’m tired of messing up my life with overcomplicated moments and sticky situations. I want to release myself from the pain I have inside”. EUSEXUA revels overall in the pleasure to be found in being present in your own body, in the moment, the pleasure in holding two fingers up to patriarchal definitions of what good sex looks like for a woman. Pleasure, EUSEXUA says, can be carefree sex with a stranger, it can be role-playing a submissive animal, as on “24hr Dog”. What’s vital is that you write your own script, perform for no one but yourself.
Perhaps the only musical mis-step here is “Childlike Things”, a fairly bizarre duet with North West (the 11-year old daughter of Kanye and Kim Kardashian) on which the latter raps in Japanese for no apparent reason, and in a manner that has the distinct scent of cultural appropriation. Still, if you’re only here for the music, it can’t be denied it’s a fantastically catchy dance-pop song!
EUSEXUA will be taken on different levels by different people. Some will embrace its entire philosophy on a deep, spiritual level as twigs intends and be forever changed as a result. Undoubtedly the album will come alive on a whole other level when married with physical performance in live shows: twigs hasn’t toured since the Pandemic aborted her planned MAGDALENE tour in 2020 and there is huge anticipation around the few EUSEXUA shows being staged. Others will appreciate EUSEXUA as purely a brilliant dance album, finding themselves sucked in at track one and unable to tear themselves away, similar to the sonic experience of Jamie xx’s recent “In Waves”.
A narrative of transcendence and joy
Some will inevitably find the album’s whole concept unbearably pretentious. Some will probably accuse her of appropriating queer club culture. These would be harsh positions to take. FKA twigs has spent so long tethered to the visceral reality of her past: the narrative of transcendence and joy in EUSEXUA really does seem vital. There are so many out there happily exploiting women’s insecurities every day financially, physically, sexually. If the worst thing we can say about EUSEXUA as a philosophy is it’s a bit pretentious, so be it. And let’s be real: we’d far rather have EUSEXUA than another album by the queue of Sabrina Carpenter clones who will crowd out the charts in 2025. We need more artists like twigs: women taking themselves and their art incredibly seriously, unapologetically taking up space with bold, audacious statements, claiming their bodies for themselves and redefining the language used to speak about female desires and pleasures. It shouldn’t be groundbreaking in 2025 and it shouldn’t be so refreshing but it really, really is.