FKA twigs - EUSEXUA

“Words cannot describe, this feeling deep inside,” FKA twigs glides on the opening title-track of her third studio album proper, ‘EUSEXUA’, before establishing a deep-rooted collective mantra: “Do you feel alone? You’re not alone.” Together, these maxims lay out an album intrinsically built on feeling, on shared experience, and on femininity – the latter of which is laid bare on the outlying pop embrace of ‘Girl Feels Good’, an ode to womanhood that directly positions the dangerous vulnerability of men against understated female power. It’s a thread that runs throughout ‘EUSEXUA’, too - a powerful audible companion to unfiltered lust, yet one that plays out with a considered acceptance of ephemeral realities.

Fittingly, in a conversation with Imogen Heap, FKA twigs recently described the soft edges to her otherwise dark-club sounds as “the pussy”, particularly when speaking to male producers. The matter-of-fact way she utters those words is mirrored in the album’s overt sexuality, whether Twigs is advocating to “fuck who you want” on ‘Drums of Death’ or tackling the self-consciousness and vulnerability of sex on ‘Sticky’. Perhaps more than that, it reflects the huge physicality of the album, one that writhes and slides in only the way a body can on a dimly lit dancefloor, euphoric and sweaty in both sound and feeling. It offers escapism grounded in hard truth, with production that lands somewhere between Madonna’s defining ‘Ray Of Light’ and a Berlin nightclub, its songs gliding from the slow, sensual and experimental, towards pounding, heady beats. It’s easy to see how ‘EUSEXUA’ is already being adopted by fans as something far more than an album, the hazy underground equivalent of BRAT summer with a massive injection of purified sex.