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See you on the dance floor? Not just her third studio-album title, Eusexua is FKA Twigs’s interdisciplinary philosophy and creative mantra, meditating on what it is to be human. And still, she came to sweat. Officially released January 24, all the usual trappings of the album rollout ramped up to the return of world-building not seen since her last album, MAGDALENE, five years ago. The British artist whose sound often defies genre conventions moved to Prague in 2022 to film The Crow, the 2024 gothic-romance flop opposite Bill Skarsgård. While in the country, she was swept up in the local underground dance scene. “In Prague, I discovered a raw community of all different types of people altogether wanting to rid themselves of their demons, of their negativity, and felt that through going out and raving every single weekend, through the weekend, I was able to heal myself,” she said in a September 2024 interview with TikTok’s Margeaux, known as marg.mp3. Surreal video teasers, a pop-up rave series, and podcast appearances further flesh out the ethereal plane that is Eusexua.
Twigs first began bread-crumbing the possibility of new music with the inclusion of an unreleased track in her spring 2023 Calvin Klein ad (the photo campaign would be banned, then unbanned, for depicting the singer as “a stereotypical sexual object”). Months later, a string of posts appeared on her Discord and Instagram. “I have been making my album in cabs in berlin, huts in big sur, caves in ibiza, roads in hackney,” Twigs captioned one post documenting the behind-the-scenes. “I have written lyrics by lakes in prague and in the toilets of raves with a biro on the back of my hand.” The album was played in full for a select crowd in downtown Manhattan in August 2024, including eternal woman about town Julia Fox.
While Eusexua is not itself a “techno” album, Twigs aimed to conjure the spirit of techno, like a welcoming into an underground scene. Below, everything we know about the album and allure of Eusexua.
Use it in a sentence?
“Eusexua” is not sexual. But also, it kind of is. In her British Vogue April cover interview with Chioma Nnadi, the artist defined the term as “when you’ve been kissing a lover for hours and turn into an amoeba with that person. You’re not human anymore, you’re just a feeling.” While in Prague, she says she ventured out to a warehouse rave on the outskirts of town, an experience that managed to clear “the most intense brain fog.” “In that moment it just occurred to me: My brain’s thinking properly again!” she recalled.
“Eusexua is the pinnacle of human experience,” Twigs wrote upon the album’s release. “And now eusexua is yours.”
Twigs also touched on how somatic healing runs through her Eusexua philosophy in an otherworldly collision on Spotify’s Countdown To podcast with singer-songwriter Imogen Heap. “I created these 11 pillars and made up these words for them,” she says of the creative process. “I started to, adjacent to the album, make up these words like croning, which is an addiction to technology.” The other ten pillars of well-being are intake, keychain, minestate, shaping, the art of sol, looping, opus, truth, eusexua body, and primal revelation. “I feel that if, I don’t mind, they can become out of control,” she explained in an interview with Wallpaper*.
Who’s featured?
Odds are impossibly low the 11-year-old North West has been to a rave of the sorts Eusexua conjures. Yet she is one of the featured artists on the album, rapping in Japanese on the aptly titled track “Childlike Things.” “Hello / My name is North-chan / California to Tokyo / Jesus king / God is praise / Jesus is the only true god,” North West says, translated to Japanese by Mikako “Meeka” Kameoka Livingston.
The true collaborative force on the album is electronic musician, producer, and Twigs’s all-around co-conspirator Koreless, who features on single “Drums of Death.” Koreless, whose real name is Lewis Roberts, was the artist’s entrée into the world of dance music. He described them as becoming “quite good friends through all this,” while Twigs named him the album’s “guiding light” in her British Vogue interview.
Eusexua all the time?
Starting, naturally, in Prague on March 8, Twigs will take Eusexua on tour, with Stateside dates in Chicago, Toronto, New York, and San Francisco.
Alongside the album, Twigs began a creative partnership with running brand ON, producing the campaign “Body Is Art.” “Training puts me in a different mind and body space that elevates me to a higher frequency. When I train, I feel very beautiful, but it’s a beauty from the inside,” Twigs said of the collection. “It’s got nothing to do with how I look on the outside. It’s just a beautiful feeling. The body is art, so why don’t we approach it that way?” A little something for the rave babes who still make it to morning boxing. Then, there was her two-week exhibition at Sotheby’s titled “The Eleven” in September 2024. The durational piece, conceived and developed by Twigs, was performed by a rotating group of 11 “movers,” each embodying the different pillars she defined in the aforementioned Spotify interview.
Ready to experience more Eusexua?
Every good party deserves an afters. In her interview with Jake Shane, Twigs revealed there would be a deluxe edition of the album in an almost too casual quote about the random locations she found herself recording and writing the album. One deluxe track was written while on a “hippie retreat” on a secluded hill in Big Sur. “Unperfectly” features “the sound of waves in Ibiza crashing at the end of the ocean,” she said, before describing the retreat as “bizarre” with “no heating, no electricity, no Wi-Fi, no doors, no curtains.” The bout of asceticism didn’t deter her from finishing a quarter of the album, however. Eusexua is out, but it’s nowhere near over.
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