In a TikTok, referencing North West’s feature on “Childlike Things,” a track off her latest album EUSEXUA, FKA twigs is dressed in a voluminous black smock, her eyebrows are threaded by silver pins, and remnants of the skullet she debuted this past summer graze the top of the screen. She twists a slice of papaya in her hand and then bites in, devouring fruit and seed. “I know ur all dying to know how North West ended up on this song,” accompanies as text. I guess I’m dying to know the thought process behind incorporating America’s least media-trained nepo baby into her art—by having her rap in Japanese, no less.
Tahliah Debrett Barnett, known by her stage name FKA twigs, is an artist in every sense of the word. Classically trained as a dancer, twigs has worked as an actor, model, strip club hostess, and, of course, as a musician. EUSEXUA, the third LP from twigs, was largely inspired by her time in Prague while filming Rupert Sanders’s 2024 adaptation of the infamous 1994 thriller The Crow (2024). After filming wrapped each day, twigs would go underground, discovering the rave culture of central Europe. And while The Crow only scored a 22% on Rotten Tomatoes, the experience provided her with the inspiration for a much more poignant project in EUSEXUA.
The chatter leading up to EUSEXUA’s January 2025 release was as much about music as it was about the cultural discourse surrounding it. twigs gave interviews in which she provided increasingly convoluted explanations about what the album (and its title) meant. She dropped seconds-long teasers of electronic beats laid over videos of herself as a leather-clad dominatrix. She played the album at invite-only parties: part club, part art exhibition. She leaned into alien bodily aesthetics. In different scenes of the “Drums of Death” music video released in September, twigs presses computer keys to a distorted techno beat, amorphous crystalline projections flow out behind her, and she has giant, black insectoid legs.
Produced by Koreless, EUSEXUA’s 11-song, 42-minute runtime is just a taste of how expansive and impossibly cool twigs’s world is. On the title track, twigs conjures a haunting soprano to share the album’s thesis: “Words cannot describe, baby / This feeling deep inside.” On “Room of Fools,” she cries out, “We’re open wounds / Just bleeding out the pressure.” On “Striptease,” in a seductive whisper-sing, she confesses, “Opening me feels like a striptease.” EUSEXUA enables us to feel radically, to live together and make something of ourselves. In an Instagram post announcing the record, twigs reflects: “We rave, we sweat, we kiss, we make love to the booming thud of culture. EUSEXUA is a practice. EUSEXUA is a state of being. EUSEXUA is the pinnacle of human experience.”
EUSEXUA is not a club record—it is a record about how being at the club makes you feel. It’s your inner monologue as the beat drops. It’s the secret whispered to a friend in the middle of the dance floor. It’s the mantra repeated while staring at your sweat-stricken face in the bathroom mirror. As “Childlike Things” roars forward at the cadence of a children’s television theme, twigs gestures towards a utopian world of her own design: “Where the wild things are, I will be / Lost in a world of childlike things and fantasies.”
In response, North West shares her own meditation (translated from Japanese): “Hello / My name is North-chan / From California to Tokyo / Jesus, the King / Praise the Lord / Jesus is the one and only true God.” West’s rapping is a clear reference to her father’s Vultures 2 project, on which she also rapped in Japanese, and bears remarkable semblance to his earlier Jesus is King record. The contrast of a young twigs (a girl from nowhere, who found stardom and the supernatural within herself) and North West (the child of international celebrities, who recites Christian gospel) demonstrates the universal feeling of EUSEXUA.
The incredible power of EUSEXUA is its ability to make and unmake celebrity, to disaggregate talent from fame, and to reshape identity as a self-contained, self-referential space. By bringing West into the frame, twigs suggests that on the dance floor, we’re all made equal. Whether an artist like twigs who finds herself now firmly in the spotlight, a celebrity like North West who knows no other setting, or a listener on the other side of the world—we are all invited to experience EUSEXUA for ourselves. On the album’s concluding track, “Wanderlust,” twigs rests her hand on our shoulder before we get into our homeward-bound Uber, and says “You’ve one life to live, do it freely / It’s your choice to break or believe in it / I’ll be in my head if you need me.” Will you follow the routes paved before you, or dance yourself free?
