"We're all getting through this our own way"
A new album from FKA Twigs seeks to conjure inexpressible bliss, while Colombian singer Ela Minus brings confessional songwriting to the dance floor.
FKA Twigs - Eusexua
Don’t worry: You haven’t missed anything. “Eusexua” isn’t a piece of new slang you’re expected to know, nor is it a product of meme culture that’s somehow passed you by. Rather, it’s a concept-word dreamed up by FKA Twigs, the visionary English singer born Tahliah Debrett Barnett— a portmanteau of “euphoria” and “sex,” yet intended to convey something altogether farther-reaching.
What that is, exactly, remains muddy, no matter how much the artist tries to elucidate it. “Eusexua is a practice",” reads on-screen text at the end of a recent music video. “Eusexua is a state of being. Eusexua is the pinnacle of human experience.” Or, as Twigs describes it in a recent interview with The Standard, eusexua is “that moment of nothingness just before a big surge of inspiration or creativity or passion.” The song “Eusexua” is more honest, admitting that it’s trying in vain to articulate the inarticulable: “Words cannot describe, baby, this feeling deep inside.”
Perhaps this sounds like an ill-defined effort to make fetch happen— but if the eusexua concept itself is nebulous, the album it christens is thankfully vivid, evocative, and crisp. It may also be the most purely pleasurable album yet from Twigs, who brings her arthouse inclinations to a visceral new venue— the club. Hearing her penchant for sensual sound effects married to pulsating beats results in her most accessible work yet, and at no expense to her inspired eccentricity.
Twigs is certainly not the only artist who’s looked to the dancefloor for her muse. Whether due to lingering trauma from the COVID lockdowns or a simple acknowledgement that bodies still matter— even in an increasingly digital world— a number of the era’s most instantly iconic albums have adopted the carefree kineticism of the club: Think of recent standouts by Jessie Ware, Dua Lipa, Beyoncé, and Charli XCX.
If Eusexua belongs to the same canon, it’s a decidedly stranger, more sonically idiosyncratic entry, borrowing equally from the dance-pop of Madonna’s Ray of Light era, Bjork’s earliest headphone odysseys, and Twigs’ own meticulousness curation of striking sound effects and rich sonic details.
At its best, Eusexua is exhilarating in its command of texture. In standout song “Keep It, Hold It,” Twigs— with production from her ride-or-die collaborator Koreless, among others— orchestrates an arresting tension between moments of pure, pummeling bliss and stretches of more reflective tones, including choral singing and what sounds like the delicate plunk of a koto.
Occasionally, the beats come hard and heavy: “Drums of Death” is merciless in its industrial drum ‘n’ bass, its unremitting aggression fueled by cartoonish vocal manipulations. Often, Twigs favors a more dulcet approach: “Girl Feels Good” is an irresistible disco anthem with appealing late-90s overtones, and the two-minute romp “Childlike Things” is pure bubblegum. Both songs are likely to stand among the year’s most irrepressible bangers— and they’re not even the strongest songs on the album. That honor belongs to “Room of Fools,” a perfect glitter-ball confection of pulsing synths, rumbling low-end, and Twigs’ feisty purr.
It’s probably for the best that Twigs’ lyrics don’t linger long on the ineffable feelings suggested by “eusexua”— even if it means these songs don’t quite justify the difficult-to-explain concept that gives the album its title. For the most part, Eusexua mines ideas that are familiar to the dance-pop canon— “Striptease” offers language to express intimacy and vulnerability, while “Girl Feels Good” celebrates female pleasure. In “Perfect Stranger,” the singer finds solace in the dancefloor’s anonymous connections: “We’re all getting through this our own way” would have been a perfect one-liner for all those pandemic-era living room dance parties.
Then again, such sentiments never go out of style— and if Eusexua sounds vague in theory, the songs connect with a resonant universality. It may not be the pinnacle of human experience, but it’s certainly a peak in the FKA Twigs catalog— artful, accessible, and bursting with pleasure.
My rating: 7.5 out of 10.
Ela Minus - DÍA
“I’ll keep writing melodies to sing away the gloom.”
Those words arrive toward the beginning of DÍA, the second album from Colombian singer and songwriter Ela Minus— and if it sounds like an unlikely mission statement for a fizzy dance record, it’s because DÍA isn’t actually as fizzy as it first seems. Beneath its glistening synths and pulsing beats there’s a surprising amount of vulnerability— it’s the work of an artist whose vision of dance music is less about anthems of empowerment, more about courageously baring her own scars.
Reviewing the album for Pitchfork, Stuart Berman puts it this way: “The club is traditionally the place where you can escape all the problems in your life and the world at large, but it’s where Ela Minus goes to confront them.” He goes on to compare the album to a “confession booth,” an apt descriptor of its unflinching candor.
The specifics of DÍA were fired in a crucible of personal and creative setbacks, including financial strain, forced relocation, and an entire album’s worth of songs that got scuttled when Minus realized they didn’t accurately reflect her own state of restlessness. Her decision to go back to the drawing board is vindicated by DÍA, an album that combines club-ready beats, soaring pop hooks, and a kind of emotional earnestness that gives the entire album a sense of grit— these sugar-rush songs are laced with sour self-reflection, creating a pungent and addicting aftertaste.
Like FKA Twigs, Minus strikes a balance between artsiness and her more populist bent. Instrumental opener “Abrir Monte” uses ponderous synths to create a mind-clearing prelude— truthfully, it’s very skippable— while “Idols” conjures some of the delicate strangeness of Vespertine-era Bjork. Toward the end of the album, a series of three interconnected songs— “Onwards,” “And,” “Upwards”— attests to Minus’ conceptual thinking, her ability to take a singles-driven medium like dance music and to transform it into something big-picture.
Lyrically, the album reckons with trauma and disappointment head-on. In “Idols,” Minus sings about “chasing after phantoms” like she’s reciting from the Book of Ecclesiastes, but wrestling with disappointment leads her to realization: “It’s a shame that it takes pain to know who we are.”
Elsewhere, Minus struggles with regret— amidst the throb of “I Want to Be Better,” she laments how, for all her aspirations of maturity, she still finds herself “acting like a little kid.” And in “Upwards,” she reckons with generational trauma: “Hell is hereditary/ I choose the void instead.”
Difficult subject matter pops up throughout the album, but Minus never shies away from it; it results in an album where the soul-searching is as unremitting as the beats themselves, meaning DÍA works equally well as unflinching autobiography and as beat-driven bliss.
My rating: 7.5 out of 10.