For years, FKA twigs has been in the future. Clinically-titled projects like LP1 and EP2 showcased her metallic and warped vision of R&B, while M3LL155X experimented with bold, wonky flavors. Her second album, MAGDALENE, highlighted her now-recovered voice amongst bizarre and touching sonic backdrops, and 2022’s CAPRISONGS mixtape was her most accessible yet exciting record. No one was making music like her.

EUSEXUA, her third album, arrives with a simple starting point: Prague’s underground techno rave scene. The record is a love letter to hedonistic, sweaty nights, and the word itself, is “practice,” a “state of being,” and “the pinnacle of human experience,” she defines. “It’s a word that I don’t think exists,” she said on a recent podcast, opting more to categorize it as a feeling. “When you’ve been dancing all night at a rave, you just lose yourself. You lose eight hours to the dancefloor. It’s because you’ve been in a state of Eusexua.”

It’s easy enough to understand — chasing after a feeling is certainly more direct than building a complicated concept album around an intangible fact. EUSEXUA’s hard, meticulous beats and fervent pulsing speaks to the club’s abandon, the true feeling of nothing else mattering in the world except your body and this music. The title track, an ambient slow-burn, speaks to its own ephemerality and vagueness (“If they ask you, say you feel it, but don’t call it love / Eusexua”). A dance-pop anthem like “Perfect Stranger”, the album’s easiest, speaks to the danger and opportunity a new face presents — “We’re all getting through this our own way / I’d rather know nothing than all the lies / Just give me the person you are tonight.”

Though the record is tamer than twigs’ avant-garde repertoire of songs, owing to the easy dancing of techno, certain flourishes make the record vibrant. Twigs and her partner are “Stray dogs / On the dance floor / Demigods / In unconscious flow form” on the growling, hypnotic “Room of Fools.” Similarly, on “24hr Dog”, she’s on all fours, exploring the deepest and “softest” parts of her: “I’m a slave to your design… I bend more than I thought was possible,” she sings. Such a self-examination might only be possible under the harsh lights and physical contortions of the night, steeping yourself in your own truths.

But for all its resounding joy, Eusexua doesn’t seem to make good on its promise to track the lost time of a night out, rather focusing a lot of the sonic delivery on the night’s end, when the sun rises and everyone heads home. “Sticky” reminisces on the corporeal form, only hitting its stride with a meaty, warbled wall of sound at the end. “My body aches to be known, to be expressive in itself,” she sings, and it’s curious why she didn’t choose the surrounding song to do so. Likewise, “Keep It, Hold It” and “Striptease” are pretty standard R&B before they both jolt into club beats (halfway through and then at the end, respectively).

That EUSEXUA is not twigs’ most forward-thinking album isn’t a knock against the product, just a wish that her definition of the word be expanded slightly more. The record still holds its weight with some truly left-field choices — she and North West, Kim Kardashian’s daughter, shout Japanese phrases on the bouncy “Childlike Things”, coming across more earnest and juvenile than someone like Gwen Stefani’s early-aughts obsession with the same country. “Girl Feels Good” is a Ray Of Light Madonna meets Impossible Princess Kylie Minogue that feels artsy, fresh, and aquatic as twigs sings about female pleasure: “When a girl feels good, it makes the world go round.” And the gritty claps and commanding glitches of “Drums of Death” orbit around a striking, violent ode to sex — “You can call me up, craving rabid sex,” she sings in her sweetest coo, “Devour the entire world / Fuck it, make it yours.”

FKA twigs’ vision of a club floor isn’t as dark or experimental as her explanation (or previous projects) would suggest, but it still kicks off 2025 with a deceptively immersive amalgam of beats and self-discovery. ‘Eusexua’, it seems, means a kind of freedom, and as the album unravels itself to unveil its deepest layers, the same experience could happen to you.

Pre-order EUSEXUA HERE