I am woefully unfamiliar with FKA twigs. I was tugged into Eusexua through its visuals — contorted bodies, geometric patterns on twigs’ face, her bald haircut and unwavering gaze.
“Eusexua is a practice. Eusexua is a state of being. Eusexua is the pinnacle of human experience,” twigs includes in the music video for “Eusexua.” How do I describe this state of being, this album’s sounds and where they are taking me? To describe Eusexua is to describe a bodily experience, the rhythms taking hold of my body and compelling me to move and feel.
Listening to the titular album opener, I felt the pulsing beat snaking under my skin like my blood was vibrating with the music. The production jitters underneath the semi-ethereal clearness of twigs’ voice, what Pitchfork describes as “sonic titanium — light and unfathomably strong.” This song resembles what I imagine being an atom must be like, to be everything at once and incorporeal. It is as if I become nothing but the sound waves flitting through space.
Eusexua made me hyper-aware of how music translates into bodily sensation. The buzzing static outro of “Eusexua” is reminiscent of a defibrillator: a convulsion into life, only more tentative tingling in my body. In “Girl Feels Good,” there is a near-robotic sound, reminiscent of heavy breathing, that physically took hold in my chest. “Perfect Stranger” is an aural dissolution into the moment. It is so easy to lose myself in twigs’ story, riding the pulsating waves of rhythm and desire, uncaring of danger and consequence and just surrendering to the moment through the ceaseless drumbeat (“I'd rather know nothing than all the lies / Just give me the person you are tonight.”) “Sticky” has rather sparse production at first, the notes just barely reaching each other, as if attempting to cling together. Yet as twigs sings about the pain of yearning for vulnerability, the production grows grittier. In the outro, a repetition of the intro, she is cut off by a violent bass which I swear I could feel vibrating in my bones, a sonic translation of the physical destruction caused by repression and the denial of healing.
Eusexua’s production is lush and psychedelic, using twigs’ voice as another layer of instrumentation that is sometimes cut into by the production. The main rhythm in “Drums of Death” augments different vocal splices and percussion noises with a repetition akin to convulsion. The constant repetitive stutter felt like something beating inside me, trying to get out. In “Room of Fools,” twigs’ voice feels distinctly angry during the chorus. She growls: “This room of fools / We make something together / We're open wounds / Just bleeding out the pressure.” But when she falls back to “It feels nice,” repeated over and over, her voice is ghostly and wispy. Maybe both ends of what she sings are the truth — the gritty, angry fact that we are bleeding open wounds and also the soothing feel-good of it all. Maybe this is the experience of eusexua, physically feeling the violent contradictions of the body yet at peace with it at the same time, simply letting go and letting the rhythm flow.
“Keep It, Hold It” flicks between a soft melody questioning what to do and the mantra-like chant of an answer: keep it… hold it… (if you have stopped, keep going). The song ends amidst twigs’ grainy voice and no answer. It is followed directly by “Childlike Things,” which is reminiscent of bubblegum pop. I wanted to be as whimsy as this song: twigs’ baby-voiced singing “I’ve got supersonic powers!” with bright and carefree production, featuring North West singing in Japanese praising Jesus. For me, “Childlike Things” attains a lightness untethered to this reality, fading to an end with “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” I read “Childlike Things” almost as an answer to “Keep It, Hold It,” like a nostalgic yearning and a quasi-Surrealist return to youth as the true transcendence of reality.
Tracks 9 and 10, “Striptease” and “24hr Dog,” are my current favorites. “Striptease” is simply, unbelievably ethereal. There is a hint of sultriness in the airiness of her voice and the content of her lyrics. When twigs sings “opening me feels like a striptease,” her voice is so delicate, so controlled and emotional simultaneously. Looping this song over and over, I yearn to perhaps voyeuristically open up these lyrics, learn what emotions and experiences were condensed into this single line.
Toward the end of the song, as she sings “Late nights / My sternum stretched wide,” her voice becomes painfully distorted (as if stretched) on the word “stretched.” The distortion feels like an inability to push the words out, especially with the following clarity of her voice, high and fine like the edge of a knife. I imagine a sternum stretched wide, the opening up of the bone and the heart behind it spilling out. Perhaps the stuttering is the resistance of my body right before everything comes bursting out.
In “24hr Dog,” twigs sings: “Please don't call my name / When I submit to you this way / I’m a dog for you.” It is followed by panting intertwined with the beat of the song, forcing its way into the movement of my chest. I want to live in this soundscape forever — twigs’ vocal repetition of “ah-ah-ah-ah” reverberating around my head and the blurring of guilt, desperation, pleasure and degradation, all these things once inside me now in the open air.
“Wanderlust” is the closing to the experience of eusexua. The constant desire for eusexua and euphoria does not dissipate as Twigs sings: “Hold tight when the sky's not enough / Give me pure wanderlust.” But maybe it is okay: “You've one life to live, do it freely / It's your choice to break or believe in it / I'll be in my head if you need me.” Maybe this is our collective experience ending eusexua, where twigs has led us and is trusting us to navigate alone now.
Pen Fang is a freshman in the College of Arts & Sciences. They can be reached at pfang@cornellsun.com
