Sex isn’t just sex in an FKA twigs song
As lofty as the concept of her new album Eusexua is, you have to ask: what working musician is better equipped to rewrite the definition of sexual catharsis than FKA twigs? By Skye Butchard
When Collins Dictionary named ‘brat’ their word of the year, they did so because of new connotations. While pop fans were craving a new obsession to take over Autumn, FKA twigs took it one step further and invented a word of her own.
“Eusexua is a practice. Eusexua is a state of being. Eusexua is the pinnacle of human experience.” This is the lofty text introducing the new FKA twigs record. A brief visual teaser clarified and mystified. ‘Have you experienced eusexua?’ it asked, with the high-budget camp of a perfume advert or Michael and Janet Jackson’s ‘Scream’ music video. Cult figures like Skin of Skunk Anansie and pole dancer Andrew Gregory explain what eusexua means to them. They speak as if the term has existed forever on the fringes. ‘Eusexua takes over who you are’. ‘It’s a feeling of ‘I’m that bitch’’. ‘It’s right before an orgasm’. It’s euphoria and transcendence coalescing. It’s a lot.
But then again, what working musician is better equipped to rewrite the definition of sexual catharsis than FKA twigs? Her songs have long played with the messy nuances of desire. Her lyrics twist lust into an ugly truth or a deep secret. Ten years ago, LP1 made fucking with the lights on into a future promise, asking what we’re willing to keep hidden and what we give away in the name of physical intimacy (“When I trust you we can do it with the lights on”). ‘Cellophane’ from twigs’ 2019 second album Magdalene used a lack of reciprocation as a sign of a relationship in freefall. (“Didn’t I do it for you? Why don’t I do it for you? Why won’t you do it for me, when all I do is for you?”)
On EP2, ‘Papi Pacify’ turned the language of dominance and submission into an admission of a wider power imbalance. This was made explicit in its music video, where twigs is gagged in slow motion by a partner who dwarfs her. “In the relationship, I couldn’t communicate,” she said of the partner who inspired it. “The person I was with was stopping me from explaining how I felt. So the physical manifestation is someone putting their hand in your mouth.”
Sex isn’t just sex in an FKA twigs song. The same is true on Eusexua, where sexual freedom is a tactile stand-in for understanding yourself, connecting to others and finding fulfillment after years of unsureness.
You don’t have to feel eusexua while fucking. twigs found it in the club. While staying in Prague to film The Crow, she fell for the city’s raves scene. “I’m obsessed with alternative cultures and subcultures,” she explained on Jimmy Kimmel. “To be somewhere brand new that I’d never been, that kind of amazing East Bloc techno warehouse raves, techno kids, I just couldn’t resist”. Despite being surrounded by dance music for her whole career, she called the discovery one of the biggest changes in her life while speaking to Vogue. She had found a club environment focused on experience over aesthetics. “You go inside this big warehouse and everyone is dancing. Everyone looks so good, but they’re not there to pull a look, they’re just there to dance…In that moment it just occurred to me: my brain’s thinking properly again! Because I’d had the most intense brain fog for a couple of years. And I just thought to myself: ‘This feeling is the best feeling in the whole world. How fucking incredible that I’m just alive in this place.’”