Sexy, sultry, slimy, and salacious: EUSEXUA Afterglow by FKA twigs has arrived. Bookending what has been an otherwise lacklustre year for music in comparison to the indisputably rollicking trip of 2024, FKA twigs feels like a messiah of sorts, releasing the follow-up to her eclectically thrilling rave-inspired EUSEXUA with EUSEXUA Afterglow, an album of diverse after-hours bangers the likes of which only an artist as talented and audacious as twigs could have delivered. This album packs the electricity and clangorous glory of January’s EUSEXUA while incorporating the iconic twigsian melodic soundscaping that put her on the map as one of the most exciting artists working today. EUSEXUA Afterglow is dynamic, diverse, and a perfect companion to the grimy, throbbing, industrial sound developed across EUSEXUA, sounding exactly like the album twigs declared it would be last summer when she announced the follow-up: an early-morning, post-coital, after-party of euphoric proportions.

Standouts abound on the eleven-track album, from “Love Crimes,” a pulsating, instantly energizing opener, to “Cheap Hotel,” a melty, trip-hop honeypot, trapping you in its sticky beat only to throw you headlong into the final act rave the album embodies. Twigs holds nothing back in the narrative propulsion of Afterglow, oscillating between the come-up weightiness of songs like “Slushy” and the heavy, slower, flirtatious “Touch a girl,” a song that feels like a fleeting glance at a club; or like foreplay itself. What EUSEXUA, and to the same extent, EUSEXUA Afterglow both lack in cohesion or perhaps commitment to a unified sound, twigs compensates for in her always impressive ambition to experiment and re-invent her own sound, with Afterglow feeling particularly invigorating as this re-invention at times happens within a single track.

A particular favourite track of mine, and a prime example of twigs’ inter-song experimentation, is the mid-album epic “Sushi”. Lyrically animating a whirlwind week-long romance, twigs delivers a five-minute strut-worthy, danceable beat that feels primed for rolling and grooving in a dark disco joint, only for her to rip the song apart right when the beat is about to reach its climax as the track devolves into a full on Ballroom inspired vogue house banger, reminiscent of recent albums by Beyoncé or Janelle Monáe. The movement of this song can only be described as symphonic in nature, a thrilling synthesis of styles for twigs to combine, and an audio structure that only further elucidates the cheeky theme of passion, spontaneity, and romance she lyrically conjures. If the rest of Afterglow is to be forgotten in the annals of 2025’s otherwise dubious legacy for musical invention, I’d argue “Sushi” will live as an outstanding instant classic, the type of song fans either never forget, or the type of underappreciated genius that future acolytes of the transgressive and innovative will one day dig up as an example of twigs’ prescient vision. Like Lady Gaga’s Artpop, if you’re not raving, rolling, or relishing in the verve of “Sushi” or EUSEXUA Afterglow today, I guarantee you will be a decade from now.

As a good friend of mine summarized upon hearing the album for the first time, if EUSEXUA was sativa, EUSEXUA Afterglow is Indica; it’s that post high feeling of full-body euphoria; it’s standing in a sea of swaying bodies gyrating and sloshing together in a uniquely singular way. If 2025 has been one of the more divisive years in recent political and cultural memory, EUSEXUA Afterglow feels unifying, like the warm sensation that lingers among friends and strangers after a bacchanalian night of hedonistic debauchery. It’s the afterglow, after all, and I personally can’t think of a better strategy to withstand the end of this year than to bask in its rapture and surrender to the sheer ecstasy of twigs’ creation.

Order EUSEXIA Afterglow by FKA Twigs HERE