Fans of FKA Twigs had to wait six long years for the shape-shifting artist’s return. During that time, the dancer, singer, actress, and creative visionary experienced a number of trying life challenges, both personal and professional, and emerged stronger from it.
The result was Eusexua. The title of her third studio album — a club-informed sonic landscape both synthetic and sympathetic — won’t appear in the dictionary, but it’s one of those words that, even if you can’t define, you understand its essence.
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“It’s a pure feeling of being human … a constant state of everything and nothing all at once,” says Twigs, likening the concept to childhood. “As we get older, we’re bogged down by worries and adult responsibilities and phones and emails and work and adverts — the things that consume us and leave us feeling insecure and self-conscious. Eusexua is a break from all of that. It’s like a breath of fresh air.”
The same can be said of Twigs at this juncture in her career. Long considered among the best pop alchemists (the Weeknd, Skrillex, North West — her collaborators run the gamut), she created Eusexua after a particularly dark chapter that included navigating an abusive relationship. (In 2020, Twigs sued her ex Shia LaBeouf for sexual battery, assault, and infliction of emotional distress; the two settled for an undisclosed amount earlier this year.) She found salvation on a dance floor in Prague. “I’d been stressed for so long; I’d gone through so much, and I had this moment where none of it burdened me,” says Twigs, who advocates for survivors of abuse as well as the LGBTQ+ community. “I realized I could get back to my purest sense of self — who I am deep inside. I could contact that version of myself that was pure and present and wanted to lead me.”
Despite the album’s title and the erotically charged, body-contorting choreography she and her dancers brought to the Eusexua Tour, Twigs says her expressions of sexuality are nuanced and hardly linear. To hear her tell it, the feelings come in waves: “Sometimes I feel very in touch with my sensuality and my sexuality and sometimes I don’t at all. Sometimes it’s very overt, and sometimes it’s very playful, and curious, and vulnerable. And sometimes I don’t feel sexual at all.”
That sensitivity is balanced by an inner fortitude she channels as a performer, too. Twigs’ latest movie role, playing Mother Mary in the biblical horror film The Carpenter’s Son, taps that dimension of her artistry, she says. “Mary’s peace that we see portrayed so much in pictures and in scripture, for me it came from the strength and knowledge and tenacity that she had to raise the man that was going to save the world,“ Twigs explains. “That’s an incredible amount of pressure and responsibility. She had to have a really strong backbone, even when not saying a lot. And in the film, I really chose when to assert my power.”
With the tour over, the film out, and Eusexua garnering a Grammy nomination for best dance recording, Twigs is basking in the afterglow — a word which happens to be in the title of her just-released follow-up. “I change a lot as a person,” she says. “I have this endless curiosity. It’s exhausting to keep up with myself sometimes.”
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