The first sound on “Eusexua,” the new album by FKA twigs, is a brisk, muffled thud, like the heartbeat behind a racing pulse. It’s a signal that on this LP, she is willing to deploy one of pop’s basic tools: a propulsive, danceable beat.
For more than a decade, FKA twigs — the English songwriter, singer, producer and dancer Tahliah Debrett Barnett — has defied the stereotyping that faces a Black woman making her own music. She hasn’t slotted herself into R&B, hip-hop or dance-pop; she has been an art-pop experimenter, with a high, clear soprano that reflects opera studies and an ear for long-breathed melodies and eerie, unsettled productions, often at dirge-like tempos. Although she has collaborated widely, her music has been more likely to rupture patterns than to maintain them.
Now, with “Eusexua,” FKA twigs turns partway toward pop. That’s far from unexpected; her scattershot 2022 collection “Caprisongs,” which was billed as a mixtape rather than an album, featured “Tears in the Club,” a collaboration with the Weeknd that was nearly as straightforward as its title.
The songs that are front-loaded on the first half of “Eusexua” are upbeat, flaunting their hooks. FKA twigs continues to work with the British electronic musician Koreless, a frequent collaborator since her 2019 album, “Magdalene.” But on “Eusexua” she has also enlisted co-producers who have worked with Madonna (Marius de Vries, Stuart Price, Jeff Bhasker) and other hitmakers.
The collaborators behind “Perfect Stranger,” which has already been released as a single, include Koreless, Price and the prolific, long-running Norwegian production team Stargate (Rihanna, Katy Perry, Sam Smith). It celebrates an anonymous hookup — “You’re a stranger so you’re perfect / I love the danger” — with neatly delineated verses and choruses and a pumping beat.
While “Perfect Stranger” is a conventional pop song — especially within the FKA twigs catalog — that hint of “danger” still fits into her longtime artistic narrative. From her first songs more than a decade ago, FKA twigs has presented herself as a “creature of desire,” as she sang in “Mary Magdalene.”
FKA twigs coined the word “Eusexua” — apparently melding euphoria and sexuality — and described the term on social media as “a state of being” and “the pinnacle of human experience.” She has also spoken about it as a feeling of absolute freedom and a dissolution of self into an “amoeba of culture.” In the song, she coos, “Words cannot describe, baby, this feeling deep inside.” Yet the track sounds anxious as well as rapturous. For more than half the song, her voice is isolated above nervous blips and sparse piano chords; not until she asks “Do you feel alone?” and insists “You’re not alone” does a club-ready beat come thumping in to carry her.
The desire in FKA twigs songs is rarely simple. It’s not happy-ever-after romance, not blissful sensation, not a panacea or a sanctuary. It’s chancy and fraught with unresolved issues of power, trust, jealousy, autonomy, surrender and fear, all of them weighed against the promise and memory of intense pleasure.
Yet even as she has sung about being buffeted by passion and desire, FKA twigs has flaunted utter control of her body. She revels in daring, theatrical fashions, and she has extended her youthful dance training toward mastering new styles and disciplines: krumping, pole dancing, vogueing and the sword skills of Chinese wushu. Her voice conveys vulnerability; her visual presence defies it.
The new album seesaws between newfound confidence and lingering uncertainty. In “Drums of Death,” pounding programmed beats and chopped-up, digitally skewed vocals have FKA twigs turning herself into a sexually voracious creature ready to “devour the whole world.” She revels in physical delights in “Girl Feels Good” and in “Room of Fools,” where a four-on-the-floor beat on a dance floor drives away thoughts like “We’re open wounds / just bleeding out the pressure.”
For the second, quieter half of the album, FKA twigs lets pop bravado fall away. In “Striptease” and “Sticky,” she agonizes over how much of herself she can safely reveal to a partner. And in “Keep It, Hold It,” amid the resonances of plucked and strummed piano strings, she wonders, “What have I gotta do? What have I gotta say?”
Crisp, direct pop songwriting is one more discipline for FKA twigs to learn, one more expressive avenue to explore, one more bold momentary costume. “Eusexua” tests how much she can remain herself within pop’s constraints. The answer: quite a bit.
FKA twigs
“Eusexua”
(Atlantic/Young Recordings)
