EUSEXUA

Augmenting this on-the-fly genetic editing of the tracks is a world of beguiling sounds–it simply wouldn’t be a twigs album without them. On EUSEXUA, the alien’s in the details. The piano on “Sticky” sounds like “Avril 14th” if that song’s keys were instead ping-pong balls. Voices in the coda of “Keep It, Hold It” appear to be fused with woodwinds. Metallic scratches form over the breakdown of “Room of Fools.” “Drums of Death” stutters and glitches for sport. Though it’s the most avant track here overall, “Drums” epitomizes the ethos of twigs and her main co-producer Koreless: Chop up as much as possible to create fully articulated mechanized beasts of songs. It’s all mastered gorgeously, with reliably distinct separation of sounds and vast dynamic range. A lineup of star beatmakers, mostly credited for “additional production,” also worked on these tracks, including Stuart Price, Nico Jaar, Marius de Vries, Sasha, Stargate, and Eartheater.

The most distinct sound in twigs’ music remains her voice. It’s sonic titanium—light and unfathomably strong. She evinces more versatility than ever—grunting and growling on “Room of Fools,” hand-game chanting “Childlike Things” alongside North West who, no shit, praises Jesus in a Japanese rap verse. When twigs describes her state on “Eusexua” as “King sized/I’m vertical sunrised/Like flying capsized,” she sounds somewhere between blissed out and weeping. The hook of “Room of Fools” is a succinct evaluation of the club that has her so entranced: “It feels nice.” The way she sings it is a near yodel, a melismatic unfurling of syllables from the back of her throat, as addictive and impossible for plebs to sing as the chorus of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.”

As “Room of Fools” winds down, twigs rhapsodizes about the process of losing oneself on the dancefloor: “The night I saw you/In a room of fools/I knew I could conjure/Be whoever I please.” Identity dissolution is a motif on an album whose songs are largely about negotiating comfort within the greater world. On the bottoming anthem “24 Hour Dog,” she takes a pragmatic approach to submission: “Your love chores distract me from my worst flaws/Setting free/The softest part of me.” Repeatedly, twigs sings of the difficulty she has in baring her true self: “Opening me feels like a striptease.” Just as her songs work to find their final forms, so does twigs, whose persona has come a long way from the “eerie, post-humanist, Uncanny Valley-girl aesthetic” of her 2014 debut.

twigs remains a challenging and beguiling figure in contemporary music, but over the past decade, she’s softened a bit to let in more soul, fun, and humor. EUSEXUA is more a thawing than a complete reimagining of twigs as a pop artist, retaining her quirks and fixations while telling a story of transformation through club music. Our lady of perpetual healing is both a model and guru on an album that’s always concerning itself with the boundless potential of imagination. Over the gentle breaks of the final song, “Wanderlust,” she tells us, “I’ll be in my head if you need me.” Like much of EUSEXUA, the song is conversant with pop but not beholden to it. In other words, twigs has found her sweet spot.

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