Review Summary: it's your life and you're my main character
When an artist as precious about their output rate as FKA Twigs brands an entire full-length with a neologism as groan-eliciting as 'eusexua', there's a certain amount of conceptual reckoning to be had before we can even begin to talk about its degree of success as a project. Test your poker face on a few minutes of Twigs' exultant interview disclosures, and the premise behind her third album in a decade-plus career will reveal itself to bar a vitalising, superlatively present-tense, somatically-centred healing package. 'Eusexua' is what happens when you take sensuality as a launchpad for self-care and aim for transcendence by surrendering so completely to euphoric experiences that there is simply no space left for selfhood: 'pure nothingness but also pure focus', as she put it to Vogue.
If that sounds like a lot of sexed-up bollocks covering for a very familiar strain of New Age hedonism, then to a large extent, it is exactly that. Don't mistake this for thin subject matter, though — this is no
FKA Twigs rates Eyebrow Piercings, Madonna, and Twinks (stay real, Pitchfork)! Following the punishing health problems and intense breakup chronicled on 2019's
Magdalene (along with her allegations of subsequent abuse at the hands of Shia LaBoeuf), Twigs' personal healing journey frames
Eusexua's escapism in a sympathetic light, and it also bears a more universal appeal. The ethos she reps here is something anyone with a mature sexuality can relate to: the dance of losing and finding oneself in abandonment, vulnerability and submission
is a peak of human experience, and the album owes little to originality or even tastefulness in its quest to manifest this. The make-or-break is a simple matter of how convincingly it brings its timelessly vitalising sensations to life.
To this end, Twigs' approach is deliciously non-exclusive.
Eusexua flirts with *everything* and swoons over every possibility of itself: it gestures equal parts at the abandon of clubspace as at bedroom intimacy, never leaving us entirely sure whether the body she picks up on the dancefloor is the same as the one cleansing their pores behind her shower curtain. Its most open gestures at physicality come as everything from dissociated future-dance ("Striptease") to sweaty rave nostalgia ("Room of Fools"); its intertextual matrix shows Twigs equally confident in her own voice (see the heady title-track) as in citational nods (see her approximations of Kate Bush on "Keep It, Hold It"). When all goes well, any complications and past-present negotiations that typically accompany an identity piece give way to the simple now-factor of her performance. So much the better – it's refreshing to find an artist as singular as FKA Twigs so ready not to give a second thought to who
else she does and doesn't echo.
This becomes a little more precarious in execution. True to the concept, many of these tracks are light on depth practically by design, and Twigs finds herself with little ground beneath her feet when she falls short of either personality (per "Perfect Stranger" and "Girl Feels Good"'s perfunctory regurgitations of the 2025 pop meta) or the strength of her individual titillations (per "Drums of Death" riding future-kitsch delivery so belaboured it could pass for a Grimes track): either one or the other struggles to carry the album alone. This is particularly unfortunate on the closer "Wanderlust", which stands as the most personal track on the album lyrically but comes across as an indistinct blunder in every other regard, its verses bogged down in tired hyperpop cadences, its chorus oversung and tedious, it's inert backdrop ill-placed to elevate either. It's both a creative nadir and a bafflingly misrepresentative final statement for a record otherwise excellent at projecting a distinctive voice through a familiar set of masks.
These songs may serve as reminders that anyone aiming to live
super always 100% selflessly In The Moment will inevitably experience to at least as much banality and overconscientious awkwardness as transcendent escapism, but they also lend an extra set of stakes to the remainder of the album. Across a slim majority of the tracklist, Twigs both makes good on both the concept and delivers everything you could ask from a proven pop entity with equal time for the avant and the commercial. Time and again, she attempts precarious poses and finds her balance in the most unlikely ways: highlights "Striptease" and "Room of Fools" both thrive in an impressionistic clubspace, governed less by driving beats than sinuous shifts of pace, embracing and moulding themselves around the flow of bodies in a convection between intense beats and woozy slow-motion.
It's this heightened moment-to-moment focus that carries the album. Twigs is in her element when it comes to letting the entire balance of a song hang on the intricacies of individual syllables, and she proves it as clearly as ever on "Sticky" and the shimmery title-track. Aided by feathery gossamer backdrops, her inflections on both tracks lend disarming presence and power to lyrics that command next to nothing on paper. "Sticky"'s pitchy anxiety frames Twigs' attempt to test the bounds of her partner's intimacy by
***[ing] you with the lights on as a do-or-die imperative, while "Eusexua" adopts a cornerstone line that might as well be dime store pop fodder:
you're not alone. Under Twigs' tremulous performance, the line takes on a painfully specific identity — once a limp platitude, here it becomes such a statement so precious and fragile that the sheer act of delivery causes the words to break apart in her mouth. Her flavour of
not alone is not to be confused with wholesale comfort or consolation: a sensitive reading of the way she negotiates intimacy across the rest of the album ("Sticky", "Perfect Stranger", "24hr Dog") would suggest it sounds a lot more comfortable to her than the committal overtones of the more positive
together. Keep an ear out, and you'll quickly realise this record is as much about hesitation as letting go.
Both sides of that coin come good for it. When all is said and done,
Eusexua is too tactile, too exhilarated, too human for its overall thrust to be undermined by anything, including its own fumbles or the pretentious overtures of its creator. For FKA Twigs specifically, it's a refreshing and perhaps necessary statement: where
Magdalene found itself virtually overburdened by its own emotional weight, this album is almost ponderously short of it, yet malleable and playful in a way that vindicates its escapist bent. Appropriately for a project so intent on having it all, the greatest windows of potential come from opposite extremes: might the album have tended more towards the endearingly immature romp of showstopper "Childlike Things" or towards the spartan, wavering R&B stylings of the BDSM-adjacent "24hr Dog"? Even from repeated listens, I couldn't offer a firm answer; nothing could be more fitting for an album that finds itself in unlikely places and lives most of them to their best.
