For a while, FKA twigs felt imprisoned by her music. “It felt like I’d made this ornate golden birdcage” she told The Guardian in 2019, “everything was so intricate… tapestries and beading and beautiful wirework… I was like, ‘oh my gosh, this is actually a nightmare’”. It’s a sentiment made strange by its context, given as it was on the press run for MAGDALENE, an album in no short supply of intricacy or opulence.
Twigs’ music has always been elaborate. That’s part of what makes her great. When I listen to the brittle shards of ‘Thousand Eyes’ or the dense, somersaulting drums of ‘Sad Day’, I still have no idea how those songs work, all these years later. But making music that way was exhausting, and it became clear that twigs was aching to escape the cage of her own design. In a way, it’s felt like the story of her music ever since MAGDALENE has been her making repeated attempts to escape it. The pseudo-mixtape Caprisongs was a step in that direction, as was this years’ more club-oriented EUSEXUA, but both contain plenty of Byzantine moments. It didn’t feel like she was freed of all those tapestries – not really – until today, until Afterglow. The results, unfortunately, are mixed.
Made mostly in a rush of creativity in the months since the album she released at the start of the year, EUSEXUA Afterglow contains the most simple music of twigs’ career. It continues her newfound infatuation with European rave, this time in the shape of the fun-time mixtape which Caprisongs – filled with kaleidoscopic moments as strange as any in her mainline discography – only claimed to be. But without the beading and the beautiful wirework, twigs is left, for the first time in her career, sounding a little ordinary. Songs like ‘Love Crime’ and ‘Slushy’ still pulse with the taut sine-waves of the first EUSEXUA but lack their intensity or tension; leaving behind four-to-the-floor pop songs which the likes of Rochelle Jordan, underscores and PinkPantheress are already doing far better.
A major hindrance is the lyric writing, which has fallen off the deep-end. Twigs has always been a restrained writer, and that minimalism was crucial to the alien aura of her songs. “Didn’t I do it for you? / Why don’t I do it for you?”. It was a compelling illusion, but no more. Suddenly, twigs’ words are exact to the point of cliché. “You so sexual, that body flexible” (‘Love Crimes’), “you’re a star, you’re a waterfall, shining your light on everybody” (‘Wild and Alone’), “wet thighs, I’m ecstatic / chemistry was automatic” (‘HARD’). It’s the kind of unsexy, tell-don’t-show songwriting rife in the Max Martin universe, and the exact kind of thing which twigs – writer of songs like the outrageously charged ‘Two Weeks’ – has always been the antithesis of, knowing that the tension can be better than the climax.
There are highlights, sure (twigs is too preternaturally talented to avoid those completely), like the gleeful ‘Sushi’ or gorgeous closer ‘Stereo Boy’, but even the more compelling tracks like ‘Cheap Hotel’ – a satisfyingly eerie piece of slow-garage – would rank towards the bottom of EUSEXUA’s track-list. What’s odd is that we know twigs can do this style justice – she has an album from early this same year to prove it – so its bewildering to hear her deliver one unrewarding song after another. Twigs’ music, complex and sibylline, is rarely immediate, but her songs always felt like mysteries awaiting revelation. The ones on this album feel more like problems, lacking a solution.
EUSEXUA Afterglow joins a very small class of Part Two albums, including Smashing Pumpkins’ Machina II, Carly Rae Jepsen’s Side B series, and In Rainbow’s Disk 2. The latter’s name, with its inbuilt caveat, has always allowed Radiohead fans to occasionally ignore its existence, letting it sit unremarked-upon in an otherwise unimpeachable discography. About EUSEXUA, Afterglow then I say simply: phew!
