FKA TWIGS - EUSEXUA

Have you experienced eusexua? Have you ever felt that rush of euphoria that comes over you just before an extraordinary revelation, a great idea? No? There's always the path of practice, meticulously laid out in the method and its various steps. Or you can simply cut to the chase and get a sense of the final result before setting off on any such journey. A kind of compendium of life, of exceptional mental and sensory elevation, the third album by FKA Twigs, aptly titled with a well-chosen neologism of her own invention, aims to circumscribe this state of the soul, "the pinnacle of human experience" in the musician's own words, within a totalizing sonic package, as much a product of brazen electronics as of her acquired love for pop language. Immersing yourself in such jubilation turns out to be simpler than expected.

Electronics and pop, then, the curious and wavering approach of "LP1" and "M3LL155X" merged with the major-label gloss offered by "Caprisongs". Add generous doses of affection, mainly for herself and her own vulnerability, and of memory (the whole album has been described by its author as a long love letter to dance music and club culture), and you precisely identify the hinges, the basic elements around which the entire eusexua project pivots. Rather than truly representing a crossover to the dancefloor - a somewhat pretextual notion given how many bait-and-switch gestures are thrown toward that context - the album reflects on the impact the dancefloor has had on Twigs, on its liberating potential, on the process of discovery it entailed. So, with the exception of "Room Of Fools", a techno-ish chapter drawn from the Björk of her first two albums, and "Drums Of Death", a moment all edges and percussion entrusted to the skilled hand of Koreless (the album's main co-producer), the dancefloor appears obliquely, often as a later revelation, sometimes as a distant echo, the ideal complement to a pronounced reflectiveness.

No track makes these choices more explicit than the title track. Already a classic in Twigs's catalogue, and potentially one of the defining moments of the 2020s, it builds with cunning sophistication, letting the musician's agile vocal take the lead, ushering us into the album's universe, into the incommunicability of a concept that only sound can make explicit. By the time the pulse builds, surfacing from the underground where it had been lurking, everything catches fire, turning into a powerful trance epiphany, the realization of boundless enthusiasm. It could run on breathlessly, and yet it doesn't: it vanishes as quickly as it arrived, a lightning bolt, as brief as it is capable of leaving behind an irresistible longing for more.

"Keep It, Hold It" proceeds with similar intentions, a Bush-like mini-suite in which the pastoral opening, a genuine folktronic nocturne, gives way to a powerful jungle-inflected break, long enough to sweep everything away, before the coda lets the flood back in and resolves the turbulence into a slow choral fade-out.

It's a shame that a record capable of reviving the glories of "Ray Of Light", of best channeling its captivating downtempo lesson ("Girl Feels Good" could well be a second "Swim", so it's no surprise Marius De Vries worked on it), then veers off into flat pop generalism or resorts to features that are, to put it mildly, questionable. Major-label pressure? That might explain tracks like "Perfect Stranger" (its brazenly queer lyrics are excellent, its structure - tailor-made for a clothing-store playlist - far less so) or "Striptease" (yet another variation on the trap-triplet theme), but for a track like "Childlike Things", featuring the vocal antics of eleven-year-old North West (yes, the daughter of none other than Kanye), it feels more like a deliberate joke. In the end these are minor stumbles, given that most of the tracklist looks elsewhere, but the fact remains that such a concept, such an impetuous hunger for life, could easily have held its own against the two previous albums, with perhaps a few more cuts. What's clear, though, is the sense of a new step forward, of an enthusiasm that, we're certain, will keep bearing its gifts for a long time to come.

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01/02/2025