One Year of FKA twig's Eusexua

On January 24th, it was one year of Eusexua, the third studio album by British multi-hyphenate FKA twigs, and I can’t really believe it. It feels like I was just watching the music video for the song Eusexua for the first time and being so excited to hear the rest of the album for the first time.

For context, I discovered FKA twigs in 2020. I hopped on the bandwagon around the time that her second album, Magdalene, was gaining popularity. My first ever interaction with twigs’ music was coming across the music video for Cellophane, Magdalene’s most viral and most popular song, one day while my mom was at work. I thought it was the most incredible music video I had ever seen. What compelled me about twigs was how serious and dramatic her music was. You can tell that she has a very strong creative vision behind all of the work that she puts out, and I found the aesthetics that she used really creative. Cellophane was it for me. It felt like I could never comeback.

After Magdalene, twigs put out Caprisongs, a more fun and playful record compared to Magdalene’s heartbreak and the more rigid emotionality of twigs’ first handful of EPs. Caprisongs is one of the major musical releases of my life. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it for the first time. I was expecting a project that sounded more serious, more grounded, more meticulously handcrafted, but what I was met with was a more energetic, danceable project. It was incredible. So naturally, because of the differences between these two projects (Caprisongs is a mixtape, technically, not an album) I was curious to see where FKA twigs would go next. When she started teasing a next album, posting snippets online, teasing things in her Discord, posting pictures of her face painted intricately on Instagram, I couldn’t wait. When Eusexua, the first single and title track of the album, was released, I was even more excited. To me, Eusexua was the perfect song. It reminded me more of the sound of FKA twigs when I first discovered her, it reminded me of my two favorite projects from her, her EP2 and M3LL155X EPs respectively, and not only did the song sound a little Björk-y, but the music video also looked very Björk-y. I was so excited. And then a little let down.

Don’t get me wrong, some of the most incredible FKA twigs songs of all time are on this album. Drums of Death and Striptease are both classics now, both within her fandom and, in my opinion, in all of music canon. These two songs are masters of the techno, clup-pop sound that twigs employs on this album. Unfortunately, I don’t feel this way about the whole album. It’s not even that there are songs I find bad on the album. It’s just that some of the songs, namely Keep It, Hold It and Wanderlust, fall flat. Both of these songs deliver strong emotional messages: Keep It, Hold It oscillates between twigs lamenting on her struggles, and the songs mantra and chorus: ‘What have I gotta do? / Just keep on walking, keep it and hold it.’ On Wanderlust, twigs discusses all the fruits that both life and death bare. Lyrically, the songs are very strong, but the production left me with much to be desired. Despite these lows, I was still quick to buy tickets for the Eusexua tour.

At the time, I was living in Washington state. When no Seattle date was announced, me and a friend of mine decided to take the train down to San Francisco instead. Unfortunately for us, the tour was canceled. This was such a moment at the time. Twigs had to basically cancel the tour overnight, announcing on Instagram that she had to cancel a couple dates of her upcoming tour due to ‘visa issues.’ This was a mess. People were dragging her, her Discord was crazy and overrun with questions, people on Reddit were trying to figure out if the dates would be rescheduled, it felt like everything was happening. Me and my friend still ended up going to San Francisco for our trip, though. We had 36 hours in the city and still managed to eat just about every different kind of food. In the lobby of the hostel that we stayed at, I ran into a group of girls who had come over from Nevada to see her, and we talked for a while about how disappointed we were that the show wasn’t happening. While the trip itself was relatively calm, the train takes 24 hours to get from Washington to northern California, which really made it stretch.

All in all, I liked Eusexua as an album a lot. While there are a handful of misses for me on the album, it is still an incredible piece of work. To me, there’s not a more exciting feeling than an artist continuously being able to deliver hits, even after over a decade into their career. I hope FKA twigs’ next album continues to live up to expectations.