‘Eusexua’: The Beauty And Danger Of Movement

With one of the most unique and genre bending bodies of work in recent memory, FKA Twigs stands alone with an authentic and singular artistic vision. While she has always managed to grip us with tales that resonate but feel nearly ethereal, this project, Eusexua, her third studio album comes as a true shock to the senses. Eusexua as an experience is unlike anything I have encountered in the long history of artists exploring the dance genre. That experience starts with the name Eusexua itself.  In an interview with Vogue, Twigs described Eusexua as “… the moment before I get a really good idea of pure clarity.” This definition provides us the starting grounds to grapple with the depth displayed on this album. The question becomes what is it that makes this moment before new found clarity special for FKA Twigs? 

This album has two main themes that are present in its 42 minute runtime, movement and the deconstruction of love. Both work together to form a fully fleshed out world view guided by FKA Twigs following a strict adherence to the needs of her own body. While still allowing moments for these thoughts to collide and leave Twigs with her own harsh internal contradictions. As such, the first theme we will explore is movement. 

Movement as it is portrayed in this project is not just a method of coping with the unflinching realities of life, but rather as a way of being. Many artists come into the dance genre with an appreciation for dance as means for expression but few have the life long relationship with dancing the way Twigs does. It’s that relationship that serves as the spiritual heartbeat of the project and helps Twigs deliver some of its most poignant metaphors.  Movement as it is expressed on this album is physical movement with the intent to workout the issues that your mind cannot, as the singer herself put it “Movement isn’t just performance; it’s expression, power, and transformation.”

The reason this adventure into dance music stands out so much from other historic examples of artistic exploring the genre is because of how much freedom Twigs conveys in losing herself in dance. On the song “Sticky” she says “you’re right I hold it in my body like little snakes in a bottle. It’s that discomfort with being sedentary that propels many of the narratives in this album into motion. 

The song  “Girl Feels Good” expresses the pure elation that is felt when for a moment on the  dance floor,  letting out everything she cannot put into words. The album emphasizes this through its use of sparse but impactful lyrics that give way to swelling instrumentation that doesn’t just make you want to dance but forces you to move.This concept is not used for coping or avoiding issues, rather Twigs sees that all she has gone through is also stored in her body and releasing it this way is what she needs.  This release leads us to ask what is that she so desperately needs to let go of and that is our next theme. 

The deconstruction of love on this album is a testament to Twigs ability as a songwriter and conceptual artist.  What she manages to avoid throughout this project is a trapping many  fall into  with a project this personal, the idealizing of love. The relationship that Twigs has with love itself has changed. In all that she has been through it seems that she understands that love has to regain her trust. For the time being she is satisfied with “Perfect Strangers”, the title of the third track on this album. “Perfect stranger” adds into this theory of keeping the darkness of love at bay. In the song lines like “I’d rather know nothing than all the lies”  What we see in lyrics like this is the way FKA Twigs would like to decouple intimacy from love.

We often associate love with truly getting to know someone and understanding their flaws and accepting them,  and it seems as if Twigs has looked at that process and asked herself why? With her seeing how ingrained the flaws of men can be, and how those flaws are then used as weapons against the women in their lives she asks why get to know you. She’d rather exist in this feeling of suspended euphoric harmony before it’s diluted by the knowledge of how you really are. As she sings on the title track of the album “Eusexua” “People always told me that I take my love too far , then refused to help me”. Seeing how love can lead to isolation, why let it take that toll on her mind and body unnecessarily?

 It would be easy to chalk this up to avoidance trauma but Twigs does consider letting relationships form deeper in this new way of being. Returning to  “Sticky”, we see the challenges she faces trying to reconcile these two lines of thought singing “I tried to fuck you with lights on in hopes you’d think I’m open and have a conversation“ and “ I’m tired of messing up my life with overcomplicated moments and sticky situations”. It seems that it is something Twigs truly craves and while that may be true I believe it’s no accident that “Sticky” stands as the second shortest song on a project made up almost entirely of 4 minute songs. Along with that the track abruptly cuts at the end before she can repeat the chorus this gives us clear indication that while she may want this everything in her is telling her at this moment to keep moving. 

Another song tha reinforces this concept is  “Striptease” with lines like “I’ve got a birthmark on my mind I think you’ll like”  Here again Twigs grapples with the concept of what it means to truly know someone. This time around that someone is herself she compares intimacy of getting to know her with all the sexual tension present in a striptease. Brilliantly she uses this as another way to show us her apprehension with tying intimacy and love together. Instead of going all the way giving up the entirety of who she is to this person twigs is happy to leave this interaction as just a tease. Deconstructing love this way is a form of self intimacy that she shares with us on this album but it also provides an anxiousness present in each track. It’s that nervous energy that gives way the album comes to a somewhat divided state of mind in its conclusion. 

This album has two endings, both seem to be possibilities of the outcome of Twigs new found freedom. The first bleak ending gives chilling echoes to her one past on the track “24hr Dog”. This song paints a picture of being effectively “tamed” no longer in control of her mind nor body. The lyrics go “gets dangerous sometimes just feel guilty that it gets me high” followed by “please don’t call my name when I submit to you this way”. These lyrics along with repetition of “I’m a dog for you” give us a bleak vision of the way all of the themes she has explored in this project could lead her back to destruction. She know sthat her current understanding of love is that of complete dehumanization and does know yet if she’d be able bring herschel back from that feeling.  Realistically if the album ended here the tone of this article could be nothing short of devastating. Listening to an artist give her all to explorations of freedom just to have her stripped of all autonomy would be an unrecoverable gut punch, but fortunately this is not the end. 

This leads us to the true last song on the album “Wanderlust”. A beautiful song ready to inspire the listener to overcome pain they’ve felt and ready to move through all pain yet to come. This is as close to a happy ending as Twigs can provide and all considered it is pretty optimistic. Twigs considers all of her advice on movement and acknowledges that there will be missteps singing “I see my life in motion, Mistakes in motion, Misplaced emotions“. This confirms that she has not used dance as a way to avoid reality but rather to experience unfiltered reality. Being able to take dance from a means of escape to an actual plane of expression all of its own. Exploring an entire range of freedom in her own mind that translates to the same freedom she felt while dancing .

To say this album is about self discovery is a bit myopic. Instead FKA Twigs delivers an intensely personal project filled with reminders of the past but assures us that the “moving” in moving on,  is not just a metaphor but tangible advice.  It’s enough to keep moving, even if it feels aimless. All Twigs asks of us each and every one of our movements become endowed with meaning simply because we choose to do it, as she says on  “Wanderlust” to close the album “you’ve one life to live, do it freely, it’s your choice to break or believe in it.