On a strictly superficial level, techno is as austere as it gets. Sonically, techno’s beats are meant more for raw concrete than white sand. Visually, it favors brutalist black-and-white imagery and all-black clothing rather than the colorful clothing and cartoonish aesthetics favored by more mainstream dance music flavors. If you didn’t know any better, you might think it was anti-human and against hedonism. It meant more for battlefields or hostile corporate takeovers than dancefloor escapism on a Saturday night.
Anyone who’s experienced the epiphany of a crowded, sweat-soaked techno dancefloor knows that couldn’t be further from reality. The dimly-lit concrete bunkers are a gateway to a world of wonders; steel gray industrial spaces opening up to a whirlwind of butterflies and peacock feathers, like David Lynch making The Wizard of Oz. What might look like coldness or unfriendliness from the crowd is just the fervent concentration of ecstatic worshippers, more revival meeting than the boardroom, as hundreds of pairs of boots and sneakers do their best to stomp their way to the center of the Earth. Machines may make it, but techno is all too human.
Dancefloor dissolution and connection are the main themes on Eusexua, the third official full-length from FKA Twigs. Inspired by her time in Prague while filming the much-maligned reboot of The Crow, taken by the city’s underground denizens purging themselves of their demons every weekend. These packed dancefloors led FKA twigs to experience the sensation that would give the album its name, which she has described as “the pinnacle of human experience” or “when you’ve been kissing a lover for hours and turn into an amoeba with that person. You’re not human anymore; you’re just a feeling.”
To put it more concretely, “For me, it’s also the moment before I get a really good idea of pure clarity. Like, when everything moves out the way, everything in your mind is completely blank, and your mind is elevated.” Eusexua is about transcendence, introspection, isolation, and connection – the annihilation of the spirit to make room for something more.
This peace comes partly from FKA twigs’ embrace of restriction and restraint, finding freedom between the unforgiving, unyielding onslaught of 4/4 beats. The video for the lead single and title track shows twigs shorn and androgynous, nearly cybernetic, as she pops and locks her way through a series of impossibly rigid, complicated movements – somewhere between the “Thriller” music video and Damien Jalet’s choreography for Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake.
By about three and a half minutes, a nearly static shot depicts a hand frozen on a grim office park keyboard. The left-hand glitches out in a senseless drill ‘n’ bass abstraction while the right-hand tries to establish some sense of meaning. The camera then pulls back to reveal an inverted office. Visually, this seems to turn business logic on its head, turning technological tools toward pleasure rather than profit.
The “Striptease” video deals similarly with ideas of restraint and escape, with twigs running for her life through a subterranean tunnel, pursued by a car full of harassers before surrendering to a modern ballet striptease, stripping off as bystanders watch in either fascination or horror – Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession over drum ‘n’ bass beats. Her transparency and vulnerability transform her into some extra-dimensional being, an androgynous plurality that levitates off the ground before being reborn as an android Athena, all dressed in white.
So does “Perfect Stranger”, which shows twigs in a variety of bondage gear and domestic situations in some honeycomb council estate while singing about the merits of anonymous hookups.
Eusexua acknowledges the limitations and restrictions, the contradictions and psychic tensions that come from living in the modern world, like the simultaneous pressure to be both sexy and sexless that women face. FKA twigs came face to face with this hypocrisy in 2023 when an ad campaign she filmed for Calvin Klein was first banned for objectification and then quickly unbanned. It seems unlikely that a male model would have received such severe backlash for wearing very little in an underwear ad.
The anonymous corporate aesthetics of the “Eusexua” video acknowledge that we all must make a living, which is inherently compromising. Yet, we all deserve joy, love, connection, laughter, and friendship. We need them if we have any hope of resistance.
FKA Twigs’ Eusexua succeeds by acknowledging the bars that imprison us and the lives that happen inside. She simultaneously focuses on the strings that make us dance, twitch, jerk, and scream, and the beauty of ballet. It’s a conceptual masterpiece that speaks to the heart and the head, the spirit and the body, reminding us that these things are not nearly as separate as some would have us believe.