- The British artist's gorgeous new single conjures a euphoria that's difficult to reach, and even harder to define.
- FKA twigs knows that words don't fail. Language, in fact, embodies resilience, a chameleonic cradle of human culture that enunciates joy as easily as it foments wreckage. Sure, certain moments beget speechlessness: the rush of an orgasm, the brink of exhaustion and the best part of a head-rushing night out, when life is of your own making. But twigs has coined a name for all that.
"Eusexua," the title of twigs' forthcoming third studio album, has no definition in the English dictionary. But that hasn't stopped twigs from finding other ways to speak to it. "EUSEXUA is a practice. EUSEXUA is a state of being. EUSEXUA is the pinnacle of human experience," she wrote in an Instagram post announcing the LP, which is due out early next year. (Fans have already left behind BRAT summer and settled into the start of EUSEXUA autumn.) So: what does that sound like?
The gorgeous lead single for EUSEXUA mimics the sensation of a rising heartbeat: smooth, throbbing and desperate to breach the ribs and touch muscle to skin. If twigs was crying in the club on the flirty 2022 mixtape caprisongs, she's climaxing now, cutting to the feeling over a heavy trance-inflected beat crafted with her longtime producer Koreless and experimental vocalist Eartheater. In conversation with caprisongs's "darjeeling," where twigs first promised, "You're not alone / I'll wait til the end of time," she digs deeper on "Eusexua," insisting we find company from within: "You're not alone / And if they ask you, say you feel it / But don't call it love, Eusexua." The object of affection the song chases isn't one lover or friend past or present. It's the sweeping sensation of an affair to remember, be it with a good night at The Cause or a star-crossed lover.
Clearly well versed in the romance of blue spotlights and dehydrated fingertips grasping at thick air, twigs plays with the bones of progressive house without fully donning a helmet. The references here are deeply rooted and essential, neatly refracted through the Jordan Hemingway-directed "Eusexua" video, which sees twigs strip down and stomp upon a dull day at an open-plan office before reappearing with hands clasping dark earth. (For what it's worth, twigs has said the record's first strains came together at a rave in Prague, where she squirrelled away to scribble down concepts from the toilet.)
If "Eusexua" is a threshold to be crossed, twigs isn't unfamiliar with the side effects beyond that line. "People always tell me that I take my love too far, then refuse to help me," she laments as the song concludes. Her larkish soprano, skating across a patter of deflated synths left over from the song's peak, is as clear and lilting as ever. Left to her own devices, she has engineered a kind of euphoria that's difficult to touch, and even harder to hold.