FKA Twigs Did This for Herself

ABLUpdated 4 days Ago4 Mins read2

FKA Twigs — the singer-songwriter, producer, actor, director, and model born Tahliah Barnett in Gloucestershire, England — spent much of 2024 promoting her remake of the cult-classic The Crow and awaiting an upcoming sexual-battery case against Shia LaBeouf. In interviews, Twigs touched on parallels between her character, Shelly, who is murdered and revived at great cost, and herself, calling the film a vital step in her healing journey. While The Crow bombed after a heartwarming buildup, opening at $4.6 million against a budget of at least $50 million, LaBeouf has appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and shot a film with David Mamet, signaling a post–Me Too comeback. Now, Twigs has rolled out Eusexua, an album steeped in the dance music she gravitated toward while working on The Crow in Prague. The record’s focus on healthy sexual-power dynamics feels more political than much of the disco aesthetics and wellness jargon her major-label peers are selling. As she resumes work in forms that offer greater control and expression of intent, FKA Twigs is a delight.

Less of a deliberate jet-setting exercise than 2022’s Caprisongs mixtape, which united guests and genres across continents, Eusexua ponders states of being. Its lyrics negotiate the terms for the pursuit of pleasure and celebrate freedom of movement among consenting sexual partners. Electronic dance music weaves a shiny, jolting, hyperreal present to vanish into, and Eusexua does so adroitly, floating compliments over its frothy productions that land like affirmations from artist to listener. “You’re beautiful, you’re worth it,” “Perfect Stranger” coos. “Do you feel alone?” the title track asks. “You’re not alone.” A press release expounded on the album’s “nebulous” concept, stressing that “it is united through any moment in which we are fully embodying ourselves, present in the moment, disconnected from technology, synthesized with those around us.”

In April 2024, Twigs revealed that she had commissioned a deepfake to post while she handled other business and attended a Senate hearing to discuss the value of tech for artists and the need for strong protections for human creativity. Eusexua’s photos are suggestive of an escaped prototype android. Its lyrics and videos massage themes of joyful sex and submissiveness. Pooled with Twigs’s ideas about AI and personhood, the music gives the impression that a pop star has finally arrived who cares deeply about chilly, metallic, state-of-the-art visuals and espouses measured tech progressivism.

“I am here because my music, my dancing, my acting, the way that my body moves in front of a camera and the way that my voice resonates through a microphone is not by chance,” the artist told the Senate. Twigs experiments with emerging tech while highlighting its dangers and extols the virtues of carefully negotiated sexual connections, a tricky conversation about power and autonomy in ecstatic defiance of “your body, my choice” messaging.

Eusexua doesn’t wear all that futurism on its sleeve, though. On the surface, it finds the producer and dancer crashing into a synth-pop Zeitgeist from a different angle than the glossy, increasingly perfunctory thumpers that have become this decade’s calling card. (Twigs co-produced much of the album with Caprisongs collaborator Koreless.) Here, the beat isn’t simply a means of hurling a vocalist screamingly into a chorus; it’s often slithering and recalcitrant. The weary, glacial “Sticky” withholds the kick drum for most of two minutes before exploding into raucous industrial percussion in its final moments. The watery “Keep It, Hold It” melds gentle strings and synths, evoking mid-’80s Kate Bush, until pulsing house drums flood the mix and the singer suddenly raises her voice: “Sometimes I feel like I’m not even trying / That’s when my feet start dancing away.”

It can seem as if FKA Twigs made this music for her own emotional well-being, and we’re lucky to be treated to a diary of her favorite dance subgenres and uplifting messages. Born out of a deepening love of music, these songs deal in glassy, gossamer synth constructs but also in boisterous, low-stakes dance-pop. Last year, Katy Perry’s 143 served a blend of Ghost in the Shell optics and remedial Eurodance sonics whose parts felt interchangeable; it was dance music as dead end. But Eusexua never settles into a predictable groove: After the austere Nico Jaar–assisted “Keep It, Hold It” resolves its tension-release games, the bubbly “Childlike Things” with North West dreams about teapots made of chocolate.

Eusexua’s temporal jitteriness mirrors the geographic versatility of Caprisongs; it jumps around dance-music history, voraciously pursuing an insatiable hunger. After “Girl Feels Good” takes a dip in the psychedelic trip-hop and chill-out interests of Madonna in the late ’90s and early aughts, like a horny successor to “What It Feels Like for a Girl,” “Drums of Death” punishes with clattering electro. Later on, in “24hr Dog,” clicky percussion and synth noodles recalling a turn-of-the-millennium Björk meet lyrics that read like findom scripts or exclamations in pup play. The album doesn’t try to bowl the listener over with its global sensibilities like the mixtape, whose impetus was to reconnect with friends after the 2020 COVID terrors. FKA Twigs is crafting vehicles for multimedia performance.

The video for the title track, an instant-classic twitching dance routine full of arresting contortions, feels like a conceptual piece with images of workplace anomie giving weight to lyrical reassurance. “Drums of Death” doesn’t deliver the hook till halfway through, letting the beat breathe without words butting in, and it hits like someone chopping the front half off an extended seven-inch mix. The “choreography glitch” video released in November expresses that the beat sometimes breathes where it does to provide space for the dancer to show off. During “the body is art,” a London Fashion Week performance previewing the new album, you could watch these roles shuffling. High-energy moves dissolve into rooted gravitas when the yelping “Striptease” fades into “Room of Fools,” which the singer belts out in a comparatively arresting stasis.

Releasing an album seeking to untie our knotty sexual politics before a daunting showdown over abuse is bold. People have already been on the offensive, accusing Twigs of lying for money and making light of harrowing revelations in her lawsuit filing. The peanut gallery that memed its way through Depp v. Heard and the Megan Thee Stallion trial may have a field day with tidbits like the denunciation of puritanically surveilled body counts in “Perfect Stranger.” But naysayers will justify their animosity whether or not facts and logic check out. It’s better to live a life of leaving them to that. “Drums of Death” states its ideals more succinctly: “Crash the system, diva doll / Serve cunt, serve violence.”