FKA Twigs is giving fans the first taste of her upcoming album, Eusexua, by dropping its title track’s dystopic video. She also announced that the album will release on Jan. 24, 2025.
The Jordan Hemingway-directed video opens with Twigs showing up late to work at an office called Cronecorp. As she’s confronted by her boss, a supernatural wave seems to hit the room before Twigs and her co-workers start an intense, almost alien-like choreography.
Suddenly Twigs starts to dance in only her undergarments. The video then transforms to show Twigs as a humanoid creature crawling over dirt while surrounded by a group of stretching men. “Do you feel alone?/You’re not alone,” Twigs sings. “And if they ask you, say you feel it/But don’t call it love, Eusexua.”
At the end of the video, a title screen flashes with the words: “Eusexua is a practice. Eusexua is a state of being. Eusexua is the pinnacle of human experience.”
Twigs launched the Eusexua era with a teaser earlier this month, explaining the significance of the term. The clip includes model-like figures exploring their own definition of the Twigs term. “Eusexua takes over who you are,” someone adds, while another likens the feeling to “shimmering rose petals on my skin.”
“Have you experienced Eusexua?” Twigs asked on social media while announcing the record. “Discover September 13.” A time stamp on the musician’s official website reads: “05:00:00, 14.09.24, London.” She previously previewed the record during a listening party in New York City.
Eusexua marks her first full-length release since 2019’s Magdalene. She also dropped mixtape Caprisongs in 2022. Her musical return comes after she scrapped dozens of songs that were leaked last year. “I got hacked, somebody leaked 85 of my demos,” she wrote on Instagram Stories in October. “Well done, no new music for a while now.”
The Meaning of 'Eusexua'
FKA twigs is launching a new era, a new term, and an entirely new lifestyle: “Eusexua.” In concept and in execution, the new single and music video for “Eusexua” is everything we’ve come to expect from twigs; gorgeous, otherworldly, a little strange but undoubtedly compelling. Coming off of her most recent foray into Hollywood (with The Crow), twigs is now pouring everything into her new album of the same name, which debuts on January 24, 2025. As the video declares, “EUSEXUA is a practice / EUSEXUA is a state of being / EUSEXUA is the pinnacle of human experience.” Twigs wrote online that she and her team “cracked our sternums open and made this for you,” adding that “if i had one wish it would be that you watch it with focus, not on your phone. are you ready to experience EUSEXUA?”
A Dystopian Office
The “Eusexua” music video plays out like a dream—or that classic nightmare of finding oneself completely clueless and suddenly naked at work. Except in this case, stripping down from the constraints of business-appropriate suits and corporate workspaces is an act of liberation. Twigs’ videos always make great use of her background as a dancer, and the choreography is stunning. As the song progresses she moves from the office into the dirt, unleashing something more primal and powerful that spills out into the office environment.
Twigs has offered a few definitions of “eusexua,” including for Vogue magazine earlier this year:
“So, eusexua is a feeling that, at least in the English dictionary, there is not a word for this. You know that feeling of when you’ve been out all night and you lose 7 hours to music, and you look at your phone and you think, “Oh, my gosh, it’s 8:00 in the morning.” And last time you looked, it was 1:00. It’s because you’ve been in a state of eusexua. It’s also if you meet somebody that you really like, and you just kiss all night and you kiss for all hours. You lose time. It’s like your bodies become one and you’re just like an amoeba. And it’s like this kind of meditative, like, amazing physical experience. 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. That’s eusexua and that is the only place I want to be now.”
Posting to social media on Friday to announce the new album, she wrote, “EUSEXUA has been my practice for the years that it has been in creation. it is my opus and truly feels like a pin at the centre of the core of my artist. EUSEXUA was birthed in chicken scratch, written on the back of my hand in a toilet at a rave in prague, ‘this room of fools WE MAKE SOMETHING TOGETHER’ and we do. we rave, we sweat, we kiss, we make love to the booming thud of culture.”
A New Album
The Eleven tackles subjects including screen addiction and simplifying your life, and ties in with her new album Eusexua - a “Twigism” coined by the star summing up that lightbulb moment when things just click.
FKA twigs has spoken frankly about the “healing journey” she has undergone as she unveiled her latest project, which is about using movement to overcome past trauma.
On Friday, the 36-year-old musician opened “The Eleven”, a dance performance and exhibition showing at Sotheby’s auction house in London for two weeks.
There are three rooms: one filled with large-scale nude portraits of twigs captured by her partner, the photographer Jordan Hemmingway. Another is filled with her scrapbooks from the project, and a third room houses a blank stage, which slowly becomes the dancefloor for 11 “movers” performing a ritual-inspired routine choreographed by twigs.
“Over the past two years, I’ve been on a huge healing journey and have had to really use and live in my body again,” she said at Sotheby’s.
“I wanted to create something for my body that truly felt free; something that wasn’t exercise or dance or have any formal training in a traditional sense, but something that really subverted and also embraced what we can do with our bodies,” she said.
In 2021, the musician – real name Tahliah Barnett – filed a lawsuit against her former partner, the actor Shia LaBeouf, accusing him of sexual battery, assault and infliction of emotional distress, citing “relentless abuse”. The actor will appear in court in October.
The pair had entered into a relationship after meeting on the set of LaBeouf’s semi-autobiographical film Honey Boy in mid-2018, and were together for a year before the relationship broke down.
Speaking about her dance project as a way of self-healing, twigs described the choreography in “The Eleven” as comprised of meditative actions, inspired by somatic healing methods she has picked up in recent years.
“Each one of the eleven have an embodied meditative action that I would encourage people to do for 11 minutes by yourself or within a group of like-minded people,” she said.
While she hopes audiences will find the methods shown in the free exhibition useful, she joked that she understands some might find it “too abstract”.
“People can come and learn about it. That would make me so happy. And if not, you found it abstract and different and move on,” she said as the techno music soundtracking “The Eleven” thumps in the background.
The opening coincides with the release of twigs’ first single in four years, “Eusexua”, the title song from her forthcoming album.
The inspiration behind the artwork and album is the feeling of “Eusexua” a term coined by twigs herself, which captures the feeling of profound clarity and creativity.
Speaking about the term to media, she described it as “the moment before you get a good idea” or the “moment just before an orgasm”.
“I describe it as a moment before an orgasm, just a moment of nothingness, just a pinnacle of human experience. And in this busy world, that’s what I feel like I miss,” she said.
The singer said the word came to her when she was trying to express this feeling of finding joy in the modern world.
“Culture has gone so much into screens,” she said. “So much in the algorithm, and sometimes I’ve found myself not knowing what’s my opinion or whether it’s just something that my phone picked up.
In the past two years, twigs explains she’s been trying to root herself away from screens, and focus on self-discovery.
“I’m just to be part of a generation that grew up before phones. I was 23 or 24 when I got my first smartphone. I grew up in the country. I had a burner phone when I was 13, but I wasn’t on it. I didn’t really care; there wasn’t this attachment. I was really lucky in my teenage years to spend them growing up in a state of eusexua.”
The exhibition is in collaboration with her partner, the photographer and film director Jordan Hemmingway, who she lives with in east London.
Hemmingway was involved in the artistic production at Sotheby’s and was responsible for producing a series of 14 large-scale photographs of twigs executing the movements she developed for the project.
“The Eleven” runs from 14 to 26 September at Sotheby’s. “Eusexua” is out now.
FKA twigs has released the first single for the upcoming project EUSEXUA, her first studio album since 2019. The titular track, produced by Eartheater and Koreless, is an epic euro-trance manifesto.
twigs took to Instagram to share more details about the conception of EUSEXUA, describing a rave she attended in Prague where she invented the word. She calls EUSEXUA a “practice,” “a state of being,” and “the pinnacle of human experience.” twigs even went as far as to call the project her opus and “a pin at the center of the core of my artist.”
Set for release this winter, twigs’ promise of a transcendental rave masterpiece could serve as the darker afterparty following Charli XCX’s bubbly summertime LP Brat. In 2022, twigs’ playful genre-bending mixtape Caprisongs kept fans satiated with 17 tracks that seamlessly maneuvered from indie electronic, RnB, and reggaeton.
twigs has kept busy promoting her recent leading role in The Crow, advocating at the US Congress for regulations on generative AI technology, inked a new brand partnership with On, and invited viewers to witness a durational performance art piece at Sotheby’s London.
Listen to FKA twigs’ new single “EUSEXUA” everywhere now. The full album is set to release on January 24, 2025.
