Lounge
FKA Twigs' sonic ode to dance floor transcendence
Summary
‘Eusexua’ is cohesive, beautifully produced and thrillingly effective in its attempt to capture that experience of dance-floor catharsis
In the summer of 2022, musician, dancer and actor FKA Twigs found transcendence on a Prague dance floor. Twigs—born Tahliah Debrett Barnett—was in the Czech capital to film for a remake of 1994 cult superhero film The Crow. But when she wasn’t on set, the avant-pop starlet took advantage of the relative anonymity of Prague to explore the city’s underground techno scene. She spent her weekends at raves and free parties in old Eastern bloc warehouses, marvelling at the communal alchemy of a room full of sweaty bodies moving in time. In a toilet stall on one of those club nights, she scrawled a line on the back of her hand: “This room of fools, we make something together."
Twigs would coin a new word to describe that certain “something"—eusexua, a portmanteau of “sex" and “euphoria". More than just a feeling, eusexua is a philosophy, a practice, a state of being and a movement all rolled into one. In one interview, she described it as the joy you feel when “you’re kissing a stranger, or you’re just about to have an orgasm, or you’re just on the precipice of a brilliant idea." In other words, it’s pre-nut clarity—the sudden, stark awareness of impending bliss.
Twigs chases that taste of the ineffable all over Eusexua, her third-full length album. Working with primary co-producer Koreless and a small group of collaborators, she channels the club’s communal energy into a distinctive sound that’s meant to be a “love letter to how dance music makes me feel." Techno, garage, 90s electro and drum-and-bass all provide the raw materials that Twigs re-assembles into a synth-pop wonderland of pleasure, desire and dance-floor spirituality.
Twigs isn’t the first pop musician to pivot to the club in recent years—Beyonce famously did it on 2022’s Renaissance, and Charli XCX’s Summer-2024-defining Brat also borrows heavily from the sound and aesthetics of 90s rave. Artists like Arca and the late SOPHIE have also found incredible success by mining the connections between the body, pleasure, spirituality and a four-to-the-floor beat, crafting trans-human anthems that throb with futuristic desires. But perhaps the closest analogue to Eusexua is Madonna’s 1998 album Ray Of Light, another album by a pop star reaching for dance music as a vehicle for a new-age spiritual-philosophical manifesto.
You can even hear the influence of William Orbit—who produced all but one song on Ray Of Light—in the celestial guitar and pulsing synths of Girl Feels Good. “A girl feels good / and the world goes round," Twigs sings in a breathy croon over the Big Beat indebted production, positing female pleasure as the secret to world peace. Single Perfect Stranger is an ode to the random hookup that would fit seamlessly into a mid-1990s 2-step garage set.
The stuttering, chopped-up Drums of Death, meanwhile, sounds grittier and more contemporary, owing more to the scene around hedonistic Berlin techno club Berghain, where the track was mixed. “Crash the system, diva doll / Serve cunt / Serve violence," Twigs directs at the end of the song, a raving prophet of the techno-apocalypse.
Twigs gives her experimental tendencies free reign on tracks like the Aphex-Twin-adjacent 24Hr Dog, her otherworldly falsetto floating over warbling ambient synth as she sings a hymn to the pleasures of submission. “Opening me feels like a striptease," she sings on Striptease—at once vulnerable and seductive—over sensual r&b that escalates into full-on drum-and-bass freakout.
Though Eusexua is mostly an extroverted, outward-looking album, there are some moments of introspection and reflection. “I’m tired of messing up my life with / Overcomplicated moments and sticky situations," she sings on the piano-and-handclaps ballad Sticky. “And at best I live alone in disarray," goes the first verse on Keep It, Hold It. “I read a million people gotta feel this way."
Taken together, these songs chart the emotional peaks and flows of a proper night out, a volatile and unpredictable mix of hormones and chemicals that can change direction at the flick of a switch. The rush, the comedown and the afterglow all bleed into each other, a continuous spectrum of emotions and experiences. The club becomes a space for finding oneself—all extraneous pretensions and self-delusion stripped away in the heat and friction of the dance floor.
Eusexua may not be the first pop album to make a case for pleasure and hedonism as a tool of emancipation, but it’s a compelling addition to the canon—cohesive, beautifully produced, and thrillingly effective in its attempt to capture that experience of dance-floor catharsis. And though it’s evangelical about the magic of the club, it’s also aware that even the alchemy of dance has its limits. The album ends with the comedown gut-punch Wanderlust, the pleasure-seeking weekend receding in the dawn sunlight as more prosaic reality comes crashing in.
“I get violent in a rage when I'm sat alone," she sings, a sharp stab of self-aware loneliness that punctures the euphoria, recalling the struggles that we’re all trying to escape from. It’s a reminder that transcendence can only be temporary, that one still needs to return to the mundanity of everyday life and the imperfection of human reality. If you chase the dragon for too long, to the exclusion of everything else, you risk getting “lost in the pure wanderlust."
