New album from FKA Twigs: Euphoria on the dance floor

A visit to a club like this can definitely have a life-changing effect. Anyone who dances the night away in a brutalist concrete ruin for the first time will feel a magical energy unfold under the spell of the bass drum.

Of course, this is a truism for Berliners, but the British singer, songwriter, dancer and choreographer FKA Twigs only recently had this experience.

That’s what Tahliah Barnett, FKA Twigs’ real name, claims, at least now before the release of her third album “Eusexua”, which comes out on Friday.

During the filming of the mercilessly failed “The Crow” remake by Rupert Sanders, in which she played the female lead unfortunately unsuccessfully against a catastrophic script and a charisma-free protagonist, she visited the techno bunkers in Prague and fell in love with the sound and the Praxis des Ravens (Rainald Goetz probably didn’t read it).

The result: eleven tracks that would actually look very good on the main floor of Berghain or Tresors.

It is not without reason that the 37-year-old musician collaborated on this album with, among others, greats of the electronic scene such as the US experimental musician Eartheater, the Italian-American DJ and producer Anyma, whose career began as one half of the duo Tale of Us in Berlin, or the British DJ and producer Koreless, who is said to have tested and recorded the characteristic beat of the single “Drums of Death” during a set at Berghain.

With her released in 2022 Mixtape „Caprisongs“ FKA Twigs had turned to artificial pop aesthetics and hedonism. The hedonism remains (more on that later), but their pop is becoming more experimental again.

Fans and critics fell in love with this combination of pop and transgressive sound back in 2012 with their first mini album “EP 1”. The debut album “LP 1”, released two years later, earned the musician, who was born in Gloucestershire and moved to London at the age of 17, a nomination for the Mercury Prize.

The question arises as to whether experimental music hasn’t already arrived at the heart of pop music: TikTok star Addison Rae recently collaborated with the Venezuelan underground great Arca, and Grimes’ career draws a direct line from obscure student basement clubs in Montreal, Canada biggest stages in the world (and alongside her ex-partner Elon Musk).

Raves and clubs as a place of reference have already moved back into the center of the pop discourse with Beyoncé’s album “Renaissance” in 2022 and again especially last year with Charlie XCX’s “Brat”.

In cities like Berlin, Amsterdam and Las Vegas, techno and club culture have been mainstream culture and an economic factor for some time now – so much so that Saudi Arabia is also knocking on the door of German club culture entrepreneurs in order to import their knowledge to the Arabian Peninsula.

The desire for excess, for contemporaryness, for hedonism reigns worldwide. On the one hand, this can be a reaction to the social deprivation of the pandemic years, but on the other hand it can also be a reaction to the excessive demands of a present characterized by polycrises. Is this the dance on the volcano that also reigned in the 1920s?

If that’s the case, FKA Twigs certainly provides an appropriate soundtrack that hovers somewhere between longing, darkness and hope. Roughly modeled on the course of a club night, the singer explores emotional highs and lows and even a hopeful after-hours, peppered with references to the sound of the nineties and early 2000s.

“Girl Feels Good,” for example, is reminiscent of Madonna’s “Ray Of Light,” while “Striptease,” produced by the hyperactive hyperpop duo 100gecs, references the trip hop of Massive Attack and Co, albeit with a beat that clearly belongs in the 2020s. And even the eighties play a part on “24hr Dog,” with a guitar reminiscent of The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?”

The neologism “Eusexua” was invented by FKA twigs himself and is intended to describe a moment of absolute, transcendent euphoria. It is a practice, a condition – and the absolute highlight of human experience.

Anyone who has ever experienced transcendence in a dark concrete cathedral with high speaker towers knows this feeling of euphoric arrogance. As beautifully as FKA Twigs sums it up in pop music on “Eusexua”, it is something she wishes her heartfelt.