Maybe we need new emotions. The human experience has changed a lot lately: Creativity can be outsourced to AI, culture lives in flickering fragments on screens, and we social animals are spending tons of time alone. Perhaps the words we use to describe basic, primordial feelings—joy, sadness, anger, and those other names for Inside Out characters—no longer suffice. Perhaps that’s why we’ve been bombarded with so many neologisms to describe mind states, like brain rot, or Eusexua.
What, you haven’t heard of Eusexua? It’s a Zoolanderian term coined by the art-pop singer FKA Twigs, and the title of her fantastic new album. It, as part of the marketing campaign, has been spammed across TikTok, spray-painted on New York City sidewalks, and used to refer to a $10.50 matcha latte at a fast-casual chain. Eusexua, the official materials say, is “the pinnacle of Human Experience.” More helpfully, Twigs has explained it to be an ecstatic flow state, the feeling you get when dancing or making a really good cup of tea. It’s perfect present-ness. It’s not thinking about the internet.
This is a rich idea for her to explore, given that, for more than a decade, Twigs has modeled how deliberately made, intellectually challenging music can connect in the digital era. Delving into her art can feel like putting together a puzzle, revealing a scene that’s shadowy, beautiful, and disturbing. Her voice channels the athletic excess of opera and the serene disassociation of an ASMR video. She and her producers like to pair soft, feathery sounds with harsh, arrhythmic beats; her excellent videography heightens the sense of mystique, showing off her talents for ballet, voguing, and swordfighting.
Eusexua, her third studio album, is all about immediacy. It was inspired by a stint in Prague, where she got really into raving. As is typical for new ravers, the high was epiphanic: Twigs came away wondering why we couldn’t try to feel that way—egoless, embodied, in the moment—all of the time. She came up with a system of 11 movements to keep herself in touch with the physical world (for example: rubbing her hands together in a pancaking motion to resist the impulse to look at her phone). And she made an album of dance-pop music.
Roll your eyes if you must. After all, dance pop’s supposedly liberating power has often been hijacked over the years for cynical ends, such as Target commercials and Katy Perry albums. What’s more, Eusexua isn’t afraid of cliché. Twigs and her lead producer, Koreless, tap into 1990s and early-2000s techno-futurism. Listeners will be reminded of the bright-eyed mood of Madonna’s “Beautiful Stranger”; the glassy synths of Björk and Radiohead; even the chanted sass of the Spice Girls. A lot of the lyrics are bumper-sticker fare: “You’ve one life to live / do it freely.”
Luckily, Twigs is still too strange to go generic. These songs hide surprises everywhere: interludes of mechanical scraping; yodels and chants; North West (daughter of Kanye) rapping in Japanese for some reason. Twigs’s vocals mutate between guttural and lithe, and her melodies tend to cut against the insistent grooves of the production. On the title track, a bleeping beat encircles the listener like the walls of a downward-spiraling tunnel, while Twigs seems to sing from miles above, somewhere in the sky. “Drums of Death” builds a battering-ram thump out of chopped-up bits of singing and talking. When something resembling a chorus finally enters the song, it’s like a movie star walking into a crowded café, dampening the noise but intensifying the mood.
Is she really expressing a new feeling? Maybe, kinda, but only when the tempo slackens for the album’s final two ballads. “24r Dog” conjures a musical moonscape, desolate and stark, from which Twigs delivers electronically filtered howls of desire into the void. “Wanderlust” blends hip-hop cadences and pensive guitar as Twigs sings about sitting alone in her bed, bitterly criticizing the world, while dreaming of escape. Both tracks move unsteadily between numbed exhaustion and transcendence in a way that feels fresh—and specific to now.
Really, though, Eusexua is just a new word for an old rush. She seems to acknowledge this when “Striptease” suddenly warps the listener to the early ’90s: a drum-and-bass beat erupts, and Twigs wails in the style of the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan. Just as suddenly, the song then zooms to the 2020s by featuring the clicking, pumping “Jersey club” beat that’s in vogue today. The juxtaposition of styles is provocative, but also intuitive. With her own individual flair, Twigs is drawing a connection between party music past and present. The trancelike feeling she’s celebrating may well be music’s evolutionary purpose, and is in particular need lately.
The post What on Earth Is Eusexua? appeared first on The Atlantic.
