FKA Twigs - Eusexua

The title track of FKA Twigs’ third full-length album, “Eusexua,” opens with a beat like an Olympic sprinter’s pulse: urgent, focused, alive. Over it, Twigs asks, almost offhandedly, “I wonder how you feel?” It’s a disarming moment of intimacy from a performer so often mythologized: divine, yes, but always fully present and deeply human. As the track progresses, the emotional inquiry persists, with Twigs offering quiet reassurance: “You feel alone. You’re not alone.” In the midst of a global loneliness epidemic — where even the youngest surveyed adults report the highest rates of isolation in recorded history — Twigs delivers a timely and urgent message to all ages, but especially to the freshest ones, who will soon be in charge of decisions that affect us all.

In the club, where “Eusexua” draws everyone to the democratizing dance floor, the beat charms us like a pulse passed from body to body. My chest picks up the vibration, my heart reaching to join the symphony of all these pounding organs in the space. Twigs bridges the distance, not just between artist and listener, but between strangers in the same room. “You are not alone” is not just a lyric; it’s a physical truth. You are never really alone, despite the pervasive sense of false intimacy provided by the digital connection we have wholeheartedly embraced in the last decades, an embrace held particularly tightly by the youngest age groups who appear to feel its limits most acutely.

Subsequent tracks ride waves of bodily intensity, ecstatic, then restrained, echoing themes of touch, proximity, and fleeting connection. “Turn up your love to keep the devil down,” is a lyric that belongs as much on the dance floor as it does on the floor of Parliament. It’s both a personal and political invocation, encouraging us to embrace the stranger, whether in the nightclub or across the political aisle. This call to unity may be one of the only viable paths forward for the tender, aforementioned demographic.

The Koreless-produced “Drums of Death” is another dance banger, better suited to synchronized group movement, that also appears spliced into the video for the eponymous “Eusexua.” The accompanying video is a masterpiece of choreography, featuring Twigs as the Queen of the Freaks, leading a charge of newborn adults out of their emotional repression and into authentic exploration of each other as ethereal beings.

This album is not all gyrating pelvic movements. “Sticky” reveals the difficulty most of us have in expressing our authenticity. Twigs sings of her own hesitations: how hard it is to show someone the full, feral complexity of herself. The image is of a jungle panther: powerful, wounded, perched in high branches, protecting itself until the pain becomes too heavy to hold. When she pounces down, the pain released on her prey will be requited as her own. Just over halfway through the track, her voice breaks down into a digital instrument, resummoning us to the dance floor, and into the chaos of closeness with each other.

The remaining tracks remind us to maintain a beginner’s mind, to approach life with the curiosity of a child, to resist judgment, and to give in to the naked state of vulnerability with open sternums that feel like a vulgar striptease. “Dog for You” explores the natural power dynamics that arise when we open ourselves to deep vulnerability, asking what it means to be truly seen and held in our most exposed states. “People always told me that I’d take my love too far and refuse to help me. I was on the edge of something greater than before, but nobody told me.” Twigs delivers this closing line with defiance. She didn’t listen, and we’re all better for it. “Eusexua” is a blueprint for surviving loneliness by embracing excess: of feeling, of connection, of sound. Love too much, she urges. Turn it up. That might be the only way we survive the new world.