There's a specific feeling behind the new album from FKA twigs — the English singer, dancer and actor Tahliah Debrett Barnett — a feeling she first encountered at underground raves in Prague, in the summer of 2022.
"The feeling that culture was alive," she says. "No one has their phones out, everybody's dancing. You know, if something amazing happens at the night, you don't film it. It's just for the people there that really experience it."
It was such a distinct feeling that she eventually gave it a name, which she would also use as the title for her new album: Eusexua.
As FKA twigs defines it, "eusexua" can arise from a multitude of experiences: "It's pure presence. It's a moment of nothingness. Or it's the moment before a really incredible idea. I've experienced 'eusexua' when kissing someone I don't know really well, but I really like. So, it's this ego-less presence which is just filled with this kind of tingling clarity."
Always a multi-disciplinary artist, the music found on her new album is just one expression of FKA twigs' exploration of this amorphous feeling. Last September, she performed a "durational artwork" at Sotheby's in London called The Eleven, comprising meditational movements intended to ease the body's experience of "eusexua."
A few days before the release of Eusexua, FKA twigs sat down with All Things Considered host Juana Summers to chat about the origin of the project, its sonic influences, and how her relationship to her own body has changed in recent years.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
Juana Summers: I want to talk a little bit about your time in Prague. I know you were there in 2022 and you were shooting a movie. And I wonder – you've had this very transformative, meaningful experience there — what was it about that time in your life that made you so open to that, that allowed you to receive that, and then to translate it into the new music that we're hearing from you?
FKA twigs: I mean, I think I'd had a lot of difficult times personally in so many aspects of my life. Like so many things had just come and tied in a knot. And to compound that, I felt for me personally, I was struggling with the world around me because we'd just come out of COVID. And it was a time [when] everyone had become so focused on being online and the idea of being, I guess, perceived. So, I think that's part of the impetus for me wanting to find something in the opposite direction, a moment of complete freedom, a moment of raw human expression, beating, thudding. I don't know. Like, I was just like, ahh! It's like I just wanted something real and I wanted something imperfect that was perfect, actually.
Summers: I know that you have also been exploring the creative outlet of "eusexua" aside from music. Last year you had a performance art piece running in London. It's called The Eleven, and I don't think that I would be able to do it justice trying to explain it to our audience. So can you just describe that piece for listeners?
FKA twigs: So "The Eleven" is a movement and lifestyle method that I created along with eusexua. And it concentrates on eleven aspects of life that you can choose to work on to make your life easier, more manageable, and more ready to experience "eusexua." So it's a movement meditation. So say, for example, if my intention was to not be on my phone, not be on social media, I could do this movement meditation for eleven minutes in the morning to infuse my day with my intention. So I think "The Eleven" is a way of self-contracting and holding yourself accountable to doing those things and to making those improvements. And it's a real, tangible way of keeping track of yourself.
Summers: I'm really fascinated by the physicality of it and the way that it kind of ties into your relationship with your own body. And it made me wonder, how has your relationship with your body changed over the last few years and how does "eusexua" fit into that?
FKA twigs: Yeah, I mean, it's changed so much. I've been dancing since I was 7 or 8 and I have been professional since I was 12 years old. I have been dancing, looking at myself in the mirror, you know, judging, improving. My body's been in so much pain. I've had chronic pain for the past few years and I've had to in many ways work on that and heal myself. So I've had to do so much work on that and I feel like it's in actually a good place. I feel good. I feel like I've taken control of something and I've changed it.
Summers: I want to look forward a little bit, if we can. You have your new album. You've just announced the huge Eusexia tour, and I think no one will be surprised to know that you are going to bring it back to Prague, where the inspiration came from. How do you feel about bringing that music back to the place where you had this transformative experience that you've described that really created this moment of understanding, this feeling for you?
FKA twigs: I feel a bit shy. More shy than even like New York or L.A. or London or something. But it just felt really important for me to go and, like, honor what that place gave me. And I want to be able to share what I've created off the back of having an experience and being welcomed into that culture so deeply a few years ago.
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