Forever ’til the end of time…
Ian Mathers: First part: I do wish more pop music sounded like its makers had heard “Windowlicker” at least once, yeah. Second part: why does it suddenly feel like we’re freefalling without a parachute? Third part: you know what, they should have gone with “braindance” back in the day.
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Grace Robins-Somerville: Everyone should burn down their place of work and host a rave inside its charred shell. This song is so fucking good. Twigs can do whatever she wants forever.
[9]
Will Adams: The office choreo clip that kept bouncing around my timeline upon the video’s release was a fake-out; the stuttering boom-boom beat in the prelude is a separate song entirely, “Drums of Death.” “Eusexua” proper is breathtaking in the way the best trance music is: strobing, nervous, euphoric all at once. The titular concept would seem overwrought were it not explicated as flawlessly as Twigs does here. Her voice is suspended in mid-air as the track swirls around her, until everything falls away and she is lifted to that higher state.
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Jel Bugle: It’s ponderous, and I had to google what “eusexua” is: “a state of being” and “the pinnacle of human experience.” I didn’t really get to the summit of human experience with this one – it’s kinda Perrie Edwards x Yeule, and I feel this leaves a sort of electronic slop. Maybe it’s the kind of thing that gets played in a club, rather than on a cold drizzly afternoon, The last 40 seconds are good, where it’s more disjointed and ethereal. That should have been the whole song.
[5]
Katherine St. Asaph: Putting my editor’s cap on: Twigs used 167 words to describe the indescribable “eusexua” when one word existed and would suffice, “ecstasy.” Zero words, even, would suffice: the last part of this song.
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Mark Sinker: Listening to this engenders a state of being and the description of that state of being is: pleasant! In a somewhat nervous and spooky way! It’s not really a new state of being though, because I’ve heard other songs by FKA Twigs. It seems a vaguely needless pressure for everyone to invent a whole new word for it.
[7]
Taylor Alatorre: FKA Twigs is bad at naming things, including herself, but this is known. The syllables comprising “Eusexua” are an obstacle of her own making, which is apt for a song that portrays its (unfortunately) titular feeling as a state that must be fought and clawed for, even against one’s better judgment. As depicted, the ascent to transcendence is a rather bumpy one, speckled with earthly crevices and frictions — those chittering little clacks against the temple are what deny us an early exit from crass materiality. Twigs dances around her definitions because she knows that, despite what she says at one point, to transcribe would only tether her down further. She trusts in her voice, and its wide range of contortions, to do the real semantic lifting, and the trust pays itself back. Our reward for following her on this ersatz Eightfold Path is a guiltless surrender to the simple joys of trance, not in scare quotes but in full hands-up glory. It can’t last forever, of course, but just long enough to have made the journey worth it under any name.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Maybe my standards are too high for her — at this point, I expect masterworks from Twigs every time, songs that will stop you in your tracks through novel stylistic choices or sheer emotive weight. “Eusexua” is instead merely a case of well-executed contemporary sophistipop, hitting all of the right semi-nostalgic synth tones and rhythms to feel like a moment of ecstasy on the dancefloor. Even when it slows down I don’t get any more out of it; she phones it in a little, which is to say she does better than most working pop musicians.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: I already felt constantly alone. It’s my own damn fault. I’m getting older, so it’s my job to fix it. That is when you reach eusexua. You finally hit the end of your excuses, rationalizations, punching up and down and delusions, and you swim free into your own eusexua. Fear is a common process — it happens often when others are trying to drown you with their own despair — but fear not; eusexua is here for them too. Look past yourself to see the despair and regret you constantly feel just for existing reflected in another’s eyes; pull them too into eusexua. Eusexua will be our freedom, our community, our life. You will not have to be rich, you will not have to be handsome, you will be healed of your disabilities and difficulties, you will need no power or gratification, you will become part of us, and be a greater whole that will have you complete and loved. You will finally have help.
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Alfred Soto: Putting aside my FKA Twigs skepticism was easy: I’m a sucker for boom-clap stutterbeats. She channels K-pop and Fever Ray for the sake of inhabiting a reasonable facsimile of euphoria. She’s always been reasonable.
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