EUSEXUA, the new album by FKA twigs, presents itself as a sonic ritual; this club-rooted, spiritually charged album captures the emotional complexity of living through economic and cultural instability. Released in 2025, the album is a vital contribution to the evolving canon of recession pop, a genre historically born from periods of financial crisis and offers both escapism and emotional catharsis.

The title EUSEXUA, a term coined by twigs herself, refers to a state of euphoric sensuality: a liminal experience found in music, intimacy, and collective movement. It encapsulates the album’s central theme: the dissolution of the self into something more fluid, more communal, more divine. Sonically, the album reflects this conceptual fluidity through a palette that blends techno, ambient, industrial, and glitch-pop.

Lyrically, twigs uses EUSEXUA to explore the tension between desire and detachment. On the title track, she sings, “But don’t call it love — eusexua”, drawing a distinction between emotional intimacy and the transcendent, almost spiritual state she’s invoking. The song evolves from a restrained pulse into a glitchy, ecstatic breakdown, mirroring the emotional arc of surrendering to a feeling that defies language.

“Perfect Stranger” is another manifestation of detachment and disillusionment, almost fetishising the unknown in an ironic manner. It opens with the lines: “I don't know the name of the town you're from / Your star sign or the school you failed / I don't know, and I don't care”. It is a deliberate rejection of traditional expectations of intimacy, in favour of a connection that exists outside of cultural narratives. This is projection—a mythical encapsulation of love and desire—underpinned by the repetition of “perfect”: “You're perfect, baby, my perfect stranger”. The stranger is only  “perfect” because of the lack of personal connection. It’s an ironic encapsulation of the dissociation at the heart of EUSEXUA, which recognises that deeper knowledge often erodes idealisation and that sometimes the most transcendent experiences are also the most abstract.

In this context, eusexua becomes a coping mechanism, a way to reclaim agency in a world where emotional vulnerability often leads to pain. Twigs is not celebrating ignorance, but rather choosing presence over permanence, sensation over story. The refusal to anchor oneself in the past or future reflects a deeper understanding of how personal experiences are shaped by current societal conditions. EUSEXUA idealises the abstract and sheds cultural contexts in order to lose the self in the present moment—a transformative response to the emotional climate of recession pop. This transformation is framed as liberation, where expectations are abandoned in favour of reinvention. Twigs offers an alternative: connection without consequence, intimacy without identity.

Though EUSEXUA feels undeniably modern and unique, recession pop itself is not new. It first emerged in the late 2000s during the global financial crisis, with artists like Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, and Pitbull dominating the charts with tracks rooted in excess. These loud, brash sonic palettes designed for the club were songs of escape. The club became a site of liberation, a place to lose yourself and forget what lay outside. In the 2020s, this new era of recession pop has grown out of a different set of crises: the pandemic, climate anxiety, and economic instability. Albums like Charli XCX’s brat and Beyoncé’s Renaissance exemplify this evolution: maximalist, club-focused, yet emotionally rich. The club is no longer just a site of escapism, but one of the last remaining spaces for embodied freedom and collective expression. As traditional public spaces continue to be eroded by gentrification, surveillance, and privatisation, the dancefloor becomes a sanctuary: a space where bodies can move freely, identities can be fluid, and community can exist in real time. EUSEXUA understands this deeply. It treats the club not as a backdrop but as a sacred site of becoming, where sound, movement and intimacy converge to offer fleeting, yet powerful, moments of liberation.

While EUSEXUA and brat are born of the same cultural moment—one defined by economic precarity, digital saturation, and a hunger for release—they offer radically different emotional and sonic languages. Charli XCX’s brat is loud, ironic, and hyperreal. Its production, led by A. G. Cook and EASYFUN, leans into abrasive minimalism: dry, punchy drums, distorted bass, and lo-fi sheen. Tracks like “Von dutch” and “Club classics” centre repetition and reduction; hooks loop like mantras and vocals are filtered and flattened, detaching the music from human warmth. Lyrically, it’s sharp and self-aware, with lines like “I’m your favourite reference, baby” serving as declarations of ego, irony, and volatility. In brat, the club is a theatre of hedonism and performance: a space to be hot, loud, and seen.

Twigs’ EUSEXUA, by contrast, is introspective, spiritual, and strange. Produced by Koreless, Marius de Vries, and Ojivolta, its sonic world is textural, immersive, and spatially dynamic—especially in its Dolby Atmos mix. Where brat is compressed and dry, EUSEXUA is lush and expansive. In “Room of Fools,” twigs’s voice circles the listener like a ritual incantation; in “Drums of Death,” glitchy percussion ricochets through space. Lyrically, she leans into mysticism and ambiguity, exemplified again in “Perfect Stranger”, a song that captures the fleeting, transcendent intimacy at the heart of the album. Where brat owns the chaos, EUSEXUA dissolves into it.

Visually, they diverge too. brat is defined by its acid green colour palette, pixelated font and lo-fi, paparazzi-style visuals. It leans into glitch art, hypervisibility, and internet irony. EUSEXUA, directed visually by Jordan Hemingway, draws from club culture, religious iconography, and somatic movement. Inspired by the idea of a warehouse rave where people weren’t there to be seen, but to become angels, it offers an aesthetic grounded in presence, not performance. Flowing fabrics, soft lighting, and surreal compositions define this blurring line between body and spirit. This contrast reflects the broader tensions within recession pop: between irony and sincerity, spectacle and spirituality, consumption and communion. Both albums respond to the same crisis but offer different paths through it. One confronts, the other transcends.

The sonic architecture of EUSEXUA is as fluid and transformative as its themes. In Dolby Atmos, the album becomes fully immersive. Engineered by Alex Gamble, the mix turns EUSEXUA into a three-dimensional sound ritual. Here, sound isn’t confined to stereo and instead moves around you. In “Room of Fools,” vocals levitate and swirl like smoke; in “Drums of Death,” percussion flickers in all directions. In “Sticky,” fragmented vocals occupy distinct zones—some close and immediate, others ghostly and distant—evoking a feeling of being surrounded by multiple versions of the self. These spatial effects are not mere technical flourishes but emotional tools. The mix emphasises abrupt scene changes that mirror the album’s themes of transformation and transcendence. A sudden drop into silence, a vocal that evaporates, or a beat that resurfaces from above are moments designed to disorient and reorient, guiding the listener through phases of dissolution, ecstasy, and rebirth.

In EUSEXUA, FKA twigs offers a new kind of recession pop; one that does not simply distract from crisis, but seeks to alchemise it. This is not an album you simply listen to. It is one you enter. It is a sacred space where sound becomes ritual, where intimacy transcends identity, and where transformation is not escape, but embodiment. In a world that feels increasingly unstable, EUSEXUA reminds us that even in collapse, there is beauty, connection, and transcendence.

9.5/10