REVIEW: FKA twigs - Eusexua + Afterglow

A Very gatekeep! Valentines Double Feature

42:52 // January 24th, 2025 // Young

Yeah yeah yeah, EUSEXUA came out over a year ago now, but it had a cycle that encompassed the entirety of 2025. From the original release in January, to the reissue + B-Side bonanza in November, FKA twigs made 2025 her year. Most every movement of EUSEXUA is eminently savorable: deployable individually (say you need a song or two for a Valentine’s playlist) while remaining load-bearing to the pacing of EUSEXUA.

And hey, it’s Valentine’s Day. Let’s celebrate an album that’s all about love.

Even an inattentive listen leaves EUSEXUA’s overt sexuality resonating with the listener, without ever feeling gauche or crass. It accomplishes this by counterposing heavy electronic beats against FKA’s delicate voice, a rapier blend bleeding well-worn tropes for their ethereal roots, superated from furious love-making into subgenrecidal mess. Leading with soft, naked vulnerability only empowers the heavy confidence FKA twigs expresses within this vulnerability, making for an album that isn’t merely sexually explicit, but sexual in pathos. This thesis first presents itself most openly in the slow burn of the opener and title-track — “EUSEXUA” sets its own stage for the dynamic interplay of EUSEXUA by playing on arousal, on peaks and valleys and the complexity of moods as they shift from one into the other. With masterful sexual prowess, EUSEXUA disarms before it ever goes hard.

Although avant-garde pop deconstruction has always been fundamental to the core of FKA twigs’ sound, EUSEXUA rides the line between explorative ambience and pop elation tighter than any twigs release since 2014’s LP1. Unlike other recent electronica-adjacent pop albums, EUSEXUA effortlessly traverses subgenres while maintaining a cohesive identity throughout. Where such diversity of influences would turn a lesser project into a smorgasbord of hyper-individualized ideas, EUSEXUA refines every song through FKA twigs’ “soft-and-sensual to raw-n-hard” structure (the two exceptions being the only hard “Drums of Death,” which is a good deal more industrially minded than the rest of EUSEXUA – a boon to its sexually apocalyptic tone – and the only soft “Childlike Things,” featuring North West of all people, an inane and awesome song that is simply a banger, if completely asexual) to remarkable structural success. Nearly everything here, from popped-up EDM banger “Perfect Stranger” to the quick and heartwrenching “Sticky,” revels in the effervescent clarity of fulfilling sex, a mood that no song here wallows in more than “Striptease.” The clear highlight of the second half, and perhaps even the fulcrum EUSEXUA rests on, “Striptease” embodies its title, unwrapping itself as it plays, releasing a tension reminiscent of finally seeing an inch of skin unseen before – a tension that runs taught behind every note of EUSEXUA and pulls this excellent album together.

It would be criminal not to discuss the reissue briefly before handing this Double Feature off, particularly since “The Dare” may be the best song from this entire release cycle. It’s certainly my favorite. Reminiscent of aughts-era Madonna, “The Dare” is pure, cavity-inducing sugar pop. The sort of song that will push you past that extra mile in pilates class. I’d call it jazzerseismic. Anyways, one of the strengths of this reissue is how it reorders the original release and leaves some songs behind. Merely adding bonus tracks to the end of an album has always undermined an album’s flow for me: it deflates the decisive tension a good final track revels in, deadening its purpose into being the transition point between the album and its supplemental material, not merely adding nothing to the album but actively taking from it. FKA twigs subverted this weakness by re-releasing EUSEXUA with three different songs, a remix, and an entirely new closer, providing the supplemental material as a partially new experience to contrast against the original. While I don’t like the reissue as much — “Got To Feel” has the beat of a generic ringtone and Eartheater’s remix of “Striptease” loses the masterful subtlety of the original — listening to the supplemental material in the context of the album and not simply tacked to the end was more rewarding than supplemental material ever usually is. Of course, EUSEXUA wouldn’t be the only full album of unique material FKA twigs would release in 2025…

EUSEXUA - 8.8/10
Reissue - 7.8/10

40:11 // November 14th, 2025 // Young

FKA twigs wasted no time following up her first studio album in years. In retrospect, her ability to squeeze so much extract from EUSEXUA’s sound isn’t surprising. After all, it’s only fitting that an album so horny would come back for seconds—and this time, the sex is a bit more selfish.

While its parent album felt expansive, EUSEXUA’s Afterglow is notably more insular. For all its unabashed aestheticism, its gaze is almost always turned inward, lyrically probing and picking at every feeling that goes through your mind in the heat of the moment. It’s no less varied an album, but even the best opportunities for fire and brimstone (a PinkPanthress feature, no less) are regularly infused with patience and intimacy.

Make no mistake, there are some HUGE songs here. But while it is intensely poppy, the album resists making true pop, unlike its predecessor. The closest Afterglow gets to “radio” is the bizarro pomp of “Sushi,” which features an infectious chorus and a dozen-or-so creative detours that mirror the zenith of a long, delirious, delicious night out. The real crown jewel is “Hard”, which features some of the most sublime melodies twigs has ever put to tape, with rippling guitars and warping beats stretching it in all directions.

Beyond these exceptions, the majority of Afterglow’s pleasures are plain from the start. For as radically different as the propulsive opener is to the delicious downtempo moodiness of “Cheap Hotel,” the songs arrest you and maintain your enthusiasm, without ever really revealing further layers of emotion or sound on further listens. Even if the album never matches the longevity of its predecessor, I’m not sure that was FKA twigs’ intention. She’s gifted us an ancillary album full of excellent songs crafted for the bliss of sexual fulfillment and the uncertain moments that follow it in the dark. “Afterglow” is just about right.

Afterglow - 8/10