New work "Eusexua"

FKA Twigs: If ecstasy were a music album

Interdisciplinary and artificial: on "Eusexua", FKA Twigs tries to take technoid electronics to new heights.

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Warner Music (2))

Six years after her last album, British art-pop artist FKA Twigs is back with "Eusexua", a revealing and technoid album. Inspired by the nocturnal club scene in Prague, the 37-year-old has created a sonic manifesto for detachment, freedom and the animalistic.

Somewhere between the constant insecurity and the constant hustle and bustle of this world, people are increasingly losing the courage to embrace aesthetics. Great, multidisciplinary art is usually created by consciously moving away from the everyday. From taking a position that is as unprejudiced and profoundly abnormal as possible, which does not pursue a result but an exciting path to it as the most important goal. Tahliah Debrett Barnett has nested herself in this increasingly narrow crevice of society, perhaps not to reinvent music, but to infuse it with an element of surprise and an unerring sense of the abstract. Under her artificial pseudonym FKA Twigs, she released her debut "LP1" in 2014, the delicate "Magdalene" in 2019 and the mixtape "Caprisongs" in 2022 - all artistic sound creations in extraterrestrial spheres.

Cross-disciplinary
FKA Twigs has nestled somewhere on the planet of R&B, but also likes to hop around the sound galaxy in the direction of art pop, trip-hop or hyperpop. While FKA Twigs has increasingly conquered her own musical world, she has also long since established herself in other artistic fields. She fuses cinematic looks with visual art, bold fashion and sprawling sound derivatives like no other. Daring people who don't fear the wrath of the ancients like to compare her to David Bowie, but it is perhaps more realistic to draw a line between her and the Icelandic pop reinventor Björk, who throughout her life has been as compliant as she has been curious, always willing to be thrown in at the deep end.

FKA Twigs has been pregnant with her third album "Eusexua" for some time now. The London-based globetrotter presented the album in a small circle at an art party in New York last August, but she put a stop to the public release months later. Nevertheless, thirsty listeners were able to enjoy three singles last fall. The title track proves to be a pumping Berghain techno monster, "Perfect Stranger" shows FKA Twigs from a somewhat more relaxed side a month later, while "Drums Of Death", released in mid-November, once again blasts wildly through the party botany and makes it clear once again that Ms. Barnett, in her late thirties, really likes to sweep across the dance floor.

Let yourself be carried through the nights
The electronic-technoid rash of the new masterpiece has a European history. Almost three years ago, the artist spent some time filming in Prague for the remake of the cult film "The Crow", in which FKA Twigs played the role of Shelly Webster, which flopped badly at the cinema. She immersed herself in the Czech capital's electronic underground music scene and let the pulsating and above all mechanical sound chic and the rawness of Eastern Europe carry her through the nights. The aforementioned "Drums Of Death", in its unpolished and uncompromising nature, is the direct birth of sweaty strobe parties, which were fed with plenty of cocktails and probably also many a semi-legal substance. In the run-up to the album, she said that the artist had sometimes experienced a feeling of completion, that she had virtually felt the peak of human experience.

This is precisely the meaning of the album title. The work is intended to create a sense of transcendence between art, music, sex and community. Infinite possibilities are to be conjured up, one would find oneself right before an orgasm. The beauty of the artist's grandiloquent marketing text is that you can sometimes agree with it. "Eusexua" is by no means a reinvention of the Eastern European techno world with British and American cross-references, but the honesty and freshness that songs like "Girl Feels Good", "Room Of Fools" or "Striptease" convey make it easy to let yourself fall into the artist's wide net of sound. FKA Twigs elevates the pulsating to a philosophy and thus tells even more on a meta-level than the mere songs are able to convey at first attempt.

Only a few cracks
Only rarely does the high quality of the album develop slight cracks. On the two shortest tracks, you clearly notice that FKA Twigs is at her strongest when she gives her sounds space to unfold. At just under three minutes, "Sticky" seems rushed in several respects, while "Childlike Things" attempts to evoke a kind of simple nostalgia, but cannot keep up with the other songs in its deliberate playfulness. Despite the few teething troubles, "Eusexua" is an early highlight of the year that sets the bar very high for potential competitors this year in the technoid-pop field. FKA Twigs remains true to her line of not following any lines that have already been drawn. True greats emerge from this basic attitude.