FKA twigs Remains Unburdened on the Sweaty, Adrenalized EUSEXUA

For the most part, this year’s EUSEXUA is a marked move even further away from the heartache that defined her past. FKA twigs has never sounded freer and more focused. The album’s highlights are many: “Girl Feels Good,” “Room of Fools,” “Keep It, Hold It,” “24hr Dog.” “Girl” and “Room” are delicious slices of Ray of Light-era Madonna with warm synths, reverberated guitar and pounding beats that also recall ‘90’s Björk. They’re both legitimately exhilarating and feel fresh with a new car smell. “Room of Fools” practically begs for a spot in workout playlist rotations with its running tempo. (Marius de Vries, a key collaborator on multiple early Björk records and Ray of Light, is all over EUSEXUA.) “Keep It, Hold It” smacks of Kate Bush in the best possible way, with its hypnotic use of a choir and chanting refrain.

The excellent “24hr Dog” is the closest thing to her work pre-EUSEXUA. Just like “Hours” and “Closer,” among others, “24hr Dog” is about being so intoxicated with lust, you’ll do anything for your lover. If there’s one thing that remains consistent with FKA twigs, it’s that she is going to sing about all-consuming physical desire in one way or another. In a similar manner, “Sticky” is also sad and horny. It revolves around a simple four-note melody which sounds weirdly familiar but as if it came from a lesser artist. The tune is a low-key affair that showcases twigs’ affecting falsetto, a fake-out for the hard-hitting trap in its final 30 seconds, similar to the beat switch in Billie Eillish’s “bad guy.” Where in the past twigs would dive deeper to the heart of the matter (see “Mirrored Heart” and “Daybed”), “Sticky” veers into the aesthetic of stylized, non-specific emotion—gesturing towards something without fully exploring it.

“Wanderlust,” perhaps, has the least characteristic lyric of any other song in FKA twigs’ discography (in a bad way): “By the way, the film was brazy.” I physically recoil at the word “brazy” coming from twigs’ mouth. It sticks out as forced, trying too hard to appear casual. But that’s not the only part of “Wanderlust” that seems off. twigs also anticipates criticism of her new record, “Album’s way too long though.” She has never been known for having particularly long records, and EUSEXUA isn’t that long, at least in the context of modern pop records, clocking in at just around 42 minutes (the max length for a single LP pressing). Many pop stars (Drake, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift) have recently utilized the overly long album to take advantage of streaming numbers, but twigs has never been one of those artists. Even with the many interludes of CAPRISONGS, which is a mere six minutes longer than EUSEXUA and LP1, she has always favored quality over quantity.

And as if FKA twigs couldn’t steer further away from her past work, there is “Childlike Things,” which sounds completely unprecedented for her as well. A sugary rush of something kind of like J-pop, “Childlike Things” is the strangest thing on EUSEXUA if only for the fact that it features North West rapping about Jesus in Japanese. Her verse is very catchy, for that matter. The song is fun, nonsensical and diametrically opposed to the song following it on the album, “Striptease,” but that’s okay, because twigs sells everything she does with an impenetrable confidence. Like most of EUSEXUA, this is music you have to sweat out.

Peyton Toups is a writer based in New Orleans. His work has appeared at Pitchfork and SPIN.