Produced by ElevenLabs and Information Over Audio (Noa) utilizing AI narration. Take heed to extra tales on the Noa app.
Perhaps we want new feelings. The human expertise has modified so much currently: Creativity could be outsourced to AI, tradition lives in flickering fragments on screens, and we social animals are spending tons of time alone. Maybe the phrases we use to explain fundamental, primordial emotions—pleasure, unhappiness, anger, and people different names for Inside Out characters—now not suffice. Maybe that’s why we’ve been bombarded with so many neologisms to explain thoughts states, like mind rot, or Eusexua.
What, you haven’t heard of Eusexua? It’s a Zoolanderian time period coined by the art-pop singer FKA Twigs, and the title of her incredible new album. It, as a part of the advertising marketing campaign, has been spammed throughout TikTok, spray-painted on New York Metropolis sidewalks, and used to discuss with a $10.50 matcha latte at a fast-casual chain. Eusexua, the official supplies say, is “the head of Human Expertise.” Extra helpfully, Twigs has defined it to be an ecstatic movement state, the sensation you get when dancing or making a very good cup of tea. It’s excellent present-ness. It’s not excited about the web.
It is a wealthy thought for her to discover, provided that, for greater than a decade, Twigs has modeled how intentionally made, intellectually difficult music can join within the digital period. Delving into her artwork can really feel like placing collectively a puzzle, revealing a scene that’s shadowy, stunning, and disturbing. Her voice channels the athletic extra of opera and the serene disassociation of an ASMR video. She and her producers prefer to pair comfortable, feathery sounds with harsh, arrhythmic beats; her wonderful videography heightens the sense of mystique, displaying off her skills for ballet, voguing, and swordfighting.
Eusexua, her third studio album, is all about immediacy. It was impressed by a stint in Prague, the place she received actually into raving. As is typical for brand new ravers, the excessive was epiphanic: Twigs got here away questioning why we couldn’t attempt to really feel that means—egoless, embodied, within the second—all the time. She got here up with a system of 11 actions to maintain herself in contact with the bodily world (for instance: rubbing her fingers collectively in a pancaking movement to withstand the impulse to take a look at her cellphone). And he or she made an album of dance-pop music.
Roll your eyes when you should. In any case, dance pop’s supposedly liberating energy has usually been hijacked over time for cynical ends, similar to Goal commercials and Katy Perry albums. What’s extra, Eusexua isn’t afraid of cliché. Twigs and her lead producer, Koreless, faucet into Nineties and early-2000s techno-futurism. Listeners can be reminded of the bright-eyed temper of Madonna’s “Lovely Stranger”; the glassy synths of Björk and Radiohead; even the chanted sass of the Spice Ladies. Quite a lot of the lyrics are bumper-sticker fare: “You’ve one life to dwell / do it freely.”
Fortunately, Twigs remains to be too unusual to go generic. These songs disguise surprises in all places: interludes of mechanical scraping; yodels and chants; North West (daughter of Kanye) rapping in Japanese for some motive. Twigs’s vocals mutate between guttural and lithe, and her melodies have a tendency to chop towards the insistent grooves of the manufacturing. On the title observe, a bleeping beat encircles the listener just like the partitions of a downward-spiraling tunnel, whereas Twigs appears to sing from miles above, someplace within the sky. “Drums of Dying” builds a battering-ram thump out of chopped-up bits of singing and speaking. When one thing resembling a refrain lastly enters the track, it’s like a film star strolling right into a crowded café, dampening the noise however intensifying the temper.
Is she actually expressing a brand new feeling? Perhaps, kinda, however solely when the tempo slackens for the album’s ultimate two ballads. “24hr Canine” conjures a musical moonscape, desolate and stark, from which Twigs delivers electronically filtered howls of need into the void. “Wanderlust” blends hip-hop cadences and pensive guitar as Twigs sings about sitting alone in her mattress, bitterly criticizing the world, whereas dreaming of escape. Each tracks transfer unsteadily between numbed exhaustion and transcendence in a means that feels contemporary—and particular to now.
Actually, although, Eusexua is only a new phrase for an outdated rush. She appears to acknowledge this when “Striptease” all of a sudden warps the listener to the early ’90s: a drum-and-bass beat erupts, and Twigs wails within the fashion of the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan. Simply as all of a sudden, the track then zooms to the 2020s by that includes the click, pumping “Jersey membership” beat that’s in vogue in the present day. The juxtaposition of types is provocative, but additionally intuitive. Together with her personal particular person aptitude, Twigs is drawing a connection between occasion music previous and current. The trancelike feeling she’s celebrating might be music’s evolutionary objective, and is specifically want currently.