FKA twigs' Eusexua is a-little-too-safe sex

The immediate point of reference here is Madonna’s Ray Of Light and the late-1990s trip hop it has come to epitomize. “Girl Feels Good,” one of the funkier tracks here, could slot easily into Madonna’s enlightenment-on-the-dance-floor album. That album was “drug music without drugs,” as Madonna said at the time; it was essentially clean and celebrated new life. (The singer’s daughter, Lourdes, was born a year and a half before Ray Of Light.) But Eusexua has dirtier aspirations. The topics on twigs’ mind are immediate; you’re hard-pressed to find lyrics concerned with something she can’t see, feel, or hear in that moment. “Words cannot describe baby/This feeling deep inside,” twigs sings mere seconds into the album. Language, like individual bodies, is to be transcended, and the music must facilitate that. 

But Eusexua is not always up to the task. The percussion on “Drums Of Death,” the anchor for the glitching brain, sounds ceremonial, even polite. What’s killed here is the ego; twigs wants to shed her skin, “crash the system diva doll, serve cunt, serve violence.” That sounds a lot more fun than what the stuttering beat, which comes from frequent collaborator Koreless and K-Pop mainstays G-Dragon and Choice37, ultimately delivers. But there are grander moments; despite cliché horoscope nods, it’s easy to lose yourself in the pulsing “Perfect Stranger.” “Room Of Fools,” though lyrically revisiting the idea of a “stranger in a dark room,” contains shades of SOPHIE as it builds toward one of Eusexua’s more effective climaxes. It’s a shame there isn’t more time to luxuriate in these beats, especially when they do reach toward the promise of the post-human. 

Sweat is rare here, which is disappointing, given Eusexua‘s dance-floor aspirations. Still, twigs’ work has long sounded polished and precise. Her last full-length album, 2019’s Magdalene, adapted her delicate, intricate vocal work to madrigal melodies. Her pure, icy voice can express the feeling where words fail, as in “Sticky,” Eusexua’s most vulnerable moment. “I tried to fuck you with the lights on, in the hope you’d think I’m open and have a conversation,” she confesses before the track ends with an audio trainwreck (complimentary). Vulnerability is scary, and the dance floor is not always a respite from danger. This is soon followed with “Childlike Things,” a laugh-out-loud regression by way of J-pop that sounds AirDropped from another project. It’s wacky and out of place, but perhaps the least self-conscious moment on the album. 

Because 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. The future never actually arrives, one moment only fades into the next. twigs’ mission here is to assemble all of these pieces into a cohesive whole, and she does just that. But you might wish there were a few more rough edges at the end.