002: FKA Twigs "Eusexua" Review: Astral project onto the dance-floor of Twigs' Club Jouissance
What happens in the moment before ecstasy?
In an interview for Vogue's The Run-Through podcast Tahliah Barnett, AKA FKA Twigs, described 'eusexua' as that liminal moment just before creative inspiration strikes—when everything falls away and the mind achieves perfect clarity. It's the split second before orgasm, the intake of breath before diving into cold water, the suspended animation before bass drops on a packed dancefloor. On her third studio album, Twigs transforms this ephemeral concept into a sustained state of transcendence across eleven tracks that marry avant-garde production with her most accessible songwriting to date.
Where 2019's Magdalene chronicled religious allegory through the lens of personal heartbreak, and 2022's Caprisongs offered a mixtape-styled embrace of community, Eusexua strips away narrative entirely in favour of pure somatic experience. Where 2019's Magdalene chronicled religious allegory through the lens of personal heartbreak, and 2022's Caprisongs offered a mixtape-styled embrace of community, Eusexua strips away narrative entirely in favour of pure somatic experience.
The LP materialises as Twigs emerges from her own "hero's journey"—having traversed the underworld of Hollywood via Rupert Sanders' neo-gothic resurrection of The Crow while simultaneously processing the Kristevan abjection of intimate partner violence through her artistic praxis. Where Magdalene (2019) appropriated ecclesiastical imagery to excavate the archaeology of heartbreak—a sort of postmodern Stations of the Cross—Eusexua finds Twigs seeking her particular brand of Dionysian salvation in Prague's subterranean techno demimonde, where she sought refuge during production. The result is her most corporeally immediate collection to date, though her experimental proclivities remain, to invoke Derrida's différance, both deferred and different from mainstream expectations.
The album's production serves as both artistic statement and phenomenological metaphor. Each track builds with careful intention—most hovering between three and five minutes—creating an atmosphere of temporal displacement that mirrors the liminal nature of pre-orgasmic suspension itself. The deliberate pacing, with its crescendos and carefully orchestrated silences, forces listeners to confront their own relationship with pleasure, much like initiates awaiting revelation. This is not background music; it demands complete submission to its timeline, its rhythm as inexorable as desire itself. The effect is cumulative—by the time listeners reach the album's final third, the weight of its sonic architecture becomes almost physical, reflecting the crushing pressure of anticipated release.
In this sense, Eusexua positions itself within a rich lineage of electronic body music that stretches from Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" to Madonna's Ray of Light. Like Giorgio Moroder's productions, it eschews conventional song structure in favor of trance-inducing patterns that suggest timelessness and corporeal infinitude. But where artists like Madonna sought transcendence through spiritual awakening, Twigs' approach is more aligned with the industrial-tinged explorations of Cosey Fanni Tutti—using extreme sonic palettes to explore pleasure rather than enlightenment. The album's use of extended duration and repetitive structures recalls the meditative qualities of minimal techno, but replaces its mechanical precision with an unflinching examination of human vulnerability.
The album opens with its self-titled track, a four-minute ascension that begins with a four-on-the-floor pulse that grows increasingly complex. The choice is pointed—the steady beat serves as a heartbeat, a grounding force as consciousness begins to blur. Here, Twigs transforms it into something more primal. The metronomic precision dissolves into waves of synths and industrial textures, punctuated by the mantra "Words cannot describe, baby/This feeling deep inside." The title track represents perhaps the album's finest marriage of accessibility and avant-garde impulses. Built around a relentless techno pulse, Twigs' vocals fragment and reform as she attempts to articulate the ineffable: "Words cannot describe, baby / This feeling deep inside." The track's architectural progression mirrors the liminality of dawn breaking over a warehouse rave, calling to mind Maurice Blanchot's notion of the "space of literature" where meaning dissolves into pure experience. One might argue that Twigs is engaging in a kind of sonic détournement, appropriating the vernacular of EDM while simultaneously deconstructing its conventions.
"Girl Feels Good," perhaps the most theoretically dense track, centres on the concept of jouissance—a psychoanalytic term for pleasure that transcends the boundaries of self. Over cacophonous distortion and sweeping harmonies, Twigs intones "When a girl feels good / It makes the world go around." The implications are revolutionary: female pleasure as world-making force. The track embodies Hélène Cixous' notion of écriture féminine, offering a mode of expression that is fluid, nonlinear, and intimately connected to the female body. The production mirrors this theory—reverb-laden synths and distorted melodies create a sonic representation of ego dissolution.
On "Girl Feels Good," Twigs constructs a sonic manifestation of Julia Kristeva's concept of jouissance—that ineffable space where an ostensibly feminine pleasure transcends language and rational thought. The track's undulating synthesisers and psychedelic soundscapes create an overwhelming sensory experience that recalls Georges Bataille's writings on ecstasy and transgression. When Twigs declares "When a girl feels good / It makes the world go around" through layers of cosmic distortion, she's engaging in what Luce Irigaray would term "strategic essentialism"—reclaiming feminine pleasure as a source of power and knowledge. While the track's Madonna-influenced pop sensibilities signal commercial accessibility, the experimental production techniques maintain Twigs' position within the avant-garde tradition, creating a dialectical tension between mainstream appeal and artistic innovation.
The hypnotic "24hr Dog" pushes further into submission territory. A artificially deepened voice repeats "Please don't call my name when I submit to you this way" until the phrase becomes both threatening and liberating. The repetition recalls the ritualistic nature of BDSM while simultaneously transcending it. Power exchange itself becomes a form of freedom, both consensual and transformative.
"Room of Fools" offers the album's most explicit dancefloor statement: "Crash the system, diva doll / Serve cunt / Serve violence." The negation of social constraints here serves as political reckoning, rejecting the usual connotations of "proper" behavior in favor of pure expression. Later verses reference "opening me feels like a striptease" and "my pain disappears," suggesting liberation through vulnerability.
The instrumental passages in "Perfect Stranger" provide rare moments of relative calm. The two-step syncopation serves as an apt metaphor for the album's themes—structured freedom that remains forever in motion, impossible to pin down. The track ends with a subtle nod to UK garage, though filtered through Twigs' distinctive lens of experimental electronics.
The album's exploration of submission reaches its apex on "24Hr Dog", where Twigs examines BDSM dynamics with unflinching honesty: "Please don't call my name when I submit to you this way, I'm a dog for you." The track's hypnotic, trance-like production creates a sonic cocoon that makes space for vulnerability within surrender. Similarly, "Striptease" uses layered harmonies and ambient textures to chronicle emotional rather than physical nakedness: "I'm stripping my heart till my pain disappears, opening me feels like a striptease."
Unfortunately, "Childlike Things" represents the album's sole misstep. Featuring North West's Japanese-language rap about Christian devotion, the track feels tonally inconsistent with the project's exploration of transcendence through pleasure. The cultural appropriation and religious messaging sit uncomfortably against the album's otherwise cohesive meditation on embodied experience. Even more troubling is the decision to include a minor on an album so explicitly concerned with adult themes, regardless of which specific track houses the feature. That this cultural pastiche arrives via the offspring of America's most notorious attention economy beneficiary only amplifies its problematic nature. Moreover, the decision to feature a pre-teen on an album so explicitly concerned with corporeal jouissance creates an uncomfortable paradigmatic tension that even the most sophisticated production values cannot dialectically resolve.
Twigs' evolution as an artist is remarkable. Her journey from the experimental electronics of LP1 through the emotional vulnerability of Magdalene to the communal joy of Caprisongs has led to this moment of synthesis. But Eusexua suggests no such neat categorization is possible. The ecstasy isn't something that can be removed from the pain—it's embedded in the very fabric of existence.
The album's club influences are equally telling. Where Magdalene drew from classical composition and Caprisongs embraced pop structures, Eusexua finds its foundation in techno's ability to dissolve the self through repetition and rhythm. The ambient drones and industrial textures recall warehouse raves more than concert halls, though both share DNA with Twigs' sonic palette. The influence of producers like Koreless remains, but their experimental tendencies are now channelled into more physically immediate forms.
This tension between mind and body, between the sacred and the sensual, between individual experience and collective ecstasy, defines Eusexua. It's an album that refuses easy consumption or interpretation, demanding instead a full engagement with its philosophical and physical weight. The result is both challenging and transcendent—a work that positions Twigs not just as a musician but as a curator of sensation, transmuting club culture and somatic theory into deeply personal sonic mythologies.
Producer Koreless proves an ideal collaborator throughout, helping craft fully articulated mechanical beasts from chopped and processed sounds. "Drums of Death" stutters and glitches while maintaining an almost ceremonial intensity, with Twigs commanding "Crash the system, diva doll / Serve cunt / Serve violence" like a high priestess of club culture. The production consistently impresses with its gorgeous mastering and vast dynamic range, thanks in part to additional contributions from Stuart Price, Nico Jaar, and Eartheater.
If Magdalene represented Twigs as a "fallen alien" attempting to process human emotion, Eusexua finds her fully embodied in the physical realm while reaching for transcendence through it. "Room of Fools" captures this duality perfectly, its racing beats and abrupt gear-shifts mirroring the hedonistic abandon of bodies colliding on the dancefloor. When Twigs sings "The night I saw you / In a room of fools / I knew I could conjure / Be whoever I please," she's describing both literal and metaphysical transformation.
The timing of Eusexua feels particularly resonant amid contemporary discussions of pleasure politics and embodied resistance. As technology increasingly mediates our experience of self and other, Twigs' exploration of direct physical experience speaks to a growing desire for unmediated connection. The album's preoccupation with pre-orgasmic suspension mirrors contemporary debates about presence versus anticipation, where claims of digital immediacy clash with bodily wisdom. By focusing on the moment before release—particularly those deemed beyond language—Twigs confronts the inherent contradictions in modern society's simultaneous embrace of pleasure and fear of losing control.
In the end, Eusexua stands as a consumate rejection of contemporary music's tendency toward algorithmic alignment; a work of undiluted artistic vision. In an era where most artists seem desperate to reach a wider audience, Twigs has created something that actively demands listeners meet it on its own terms—unless they're willing to surrender to the depths with her. perhaps transcendence isn't about ascending beyond the body, but rather diving deeper into its wisdom, its wounds, its wants.
Score: 8.5/10
Favourite tracks: "Girl Feels Good," "Room of Fools," "24hr Dog"
Least favourite track: "Childlike Things"