A polished glass vitrine loomed inconspicuously on the dancefloor—until a sound tech crawled beneath it, vanishing into a tangle of electrical wiring. The steel-framed hexagon was built specially for the New York edition of FKA twigs’ Eusexua rave, which stretched from Saturday night until Sunday morning at Bushwick, Brooklyn, party space the Chocolate Factory. At first, the figure’s high-shine panes served as a kind of funhouse mirror, where revelers gazed at their dancing reflections or posed for selfies amid the piped-in fog. Only later in the evening, deep into pummeling techno sets by DJs Young Male and Meilgaarden, did the crowd amass around the vessel, watching as a fluorescent light twitched awake every few minutes. Was twigs already inside?
Following similar club nights in London and Los Angeles, the event was part of FKA twigs’ ongoing rollout for her forthcoming album Eusexua, which lands January 24. Her formal follow-up to 2019’s Magdalene includes contributions from Koreless, Eartheater, Stargate, and Stuart Price, all of whom co-produced alongside the singer, dancer, and pop visionary. She debuted the title track during a Valentino show at Paris Fashion Week last year, gesticulating in sand-filled cubes as models stalked the runway. But we didn’t glimpse the mood board until this spring, when twigs sat for an interview with British Vogue and revealed that her new body of work was inspired by the underground dance parties she frequented while filming the Crow remake in Prague. At one rave, while holed-up in the bathroom of a derelict building, she scrawled “EUSEXUA” on the back of her hand.
But what does it mean, this word of twigs’ own invention? “It’s like when you’ve been kissing a lover for hours and turn into an amoeba with that person,” she told British Vogue. “Or that moment before an orgasm.” What she found dancing on the outskirts of Prague was a sudden clarity that struck after months of brain fog and years of personal strife. The Eusexua raves have recreated the raw industrial spaces in which twigs found sanctuary. (The London and Los Angeles parties were held at the Cause and Catwalk, respectively.) All three events have solicited the same enigmatic dress code: “An unearthed nude expression birthed upon scorched soil and steel…Colors and textures are scarcely seen in this vision of a world with euphoric clarity. Take me to the pinnacle of human experience, take me to EUSEXUA.”
Translation? In Bushwick, that meant toned torsos, fishnets, tits-out, platforms, leather daddies, assless chaps, and oh-so-many beige drugstore tights masquerading as shirts. Clouds of mist impaired visibility at the top of the evening, especially for the throngs bedecked in black shades—and one gentleman in his horned gimp mask. Opposite all that Cenobite-chic was a more ethereal sect: tiers of soft nude ruffles; a man in nothing but a gauzy Roman loincloth; the three oracles draped in diaphanous white veils, swaying around the glass case in some kind of trance. Their apparent leader had a shaved dome and a large red circle blazing at the center of their forehead. It looked like they were trying to summon twigs with some arcane kinetic ritual.
Bass was bulging from the speakers. A woman wearing little more than Timberlands mounted the black platform supporting the glass case, gyrating above the crowd before getting shooed off by security. “Do you want me to chop it off?!” one girl shouted after someone said her ass was taking up too much real estate. Everyone was itching for the main event.
After numerous beat drops, fadeouts, and false alarms, a sudden shove jostled the crowd around 2 a.m. A small entourage muscled through, whisking twigs past the bodies that had congregated around the glass case. We watched as she was fed into its belly. Screams slashed the air as the lights flared: Twigs was arched back, her legs and palms resting on a red clay floor. The Patron Saint of Eusexua was garbed appropriately: A halo of curved metal encircled her chest like a planet’s ring, while matching aluminum plate bikini bottoms cut perilously close to the flesh. Her hair was piled high in a dreaded crown, its long ropes occasionally getting tangled in her 12-inch spiked platforms.
Hardstyle pounded as makeup artist Mathilda Mace, clad in white latex and a leather corset, knelt by twigs, painting her skin with clusters of jagged black lines that resembled animal scratches. (The collaborators’ “line ritual,” as Mace refers to it, was also a focal point of twigs’ Los Angeles and London raves.) After several minutes, the scorching beat sank and was swallowed up by the glittering synth arpeggio at the top of “Eusexua.” Twigs undulated slowly in the cramped space, lip-syncing and gazing directly into the eyes that studied her. There was a delightful inversion at play. Twigs—a classically trained singer with a filigreed soprano—was miming to canned vocals. It seemed as though she was upending the stuffy notion of a “real artist,” proving, like the queens of Drag Race often do, that pretending can be a heightened form of expression.
Mace had vanished by the time the PA flipped over to “Drums of Death,” the glitched-out unofficial single that kicks off the “Eusexua” music video, complete with Janet chair choreo. Twigs lunged toward the glass, filming the crowd with a camcorder as they captured her through countless iPhone lenses. As the sticky drum pads and sputtering vocal samples seeped into her new billowy house cut, “Perfect Stranger,” she sang to her own reflection, banging the walls and mouthing, “You’re beautiful, you’re worth it/You’re the best, and you deserve it.” She kept shifting the object of her song, addressing herself one moment, and then prowling to the edge of her enclosure like a caged panther, locking eyes with a gobsmacked fan. Twigs has called Eusexua “a pin at the center of the core of my artist,” and communing with her devotees in such close proximity has spawned a symbiotic exchange between viewer and performer. We film and feast upon her raw creation, and she points the camera straight back at us. She is a world builder and an iconoclast; a pop auteur who’s always in control—even when trapped behind plate glass.
Seen
- Playwright Jeremy O. Harris
- Much making out
- Indoor ciggies
Heard
- “I hadn’t handled a dick and balls since 2019.”
- “I have a moral dilemma with doing makeup on other people because I need to be the star.”
- “Everyone’s had a crush on their cousin, right?” … “Everyone’s had a cousin crush?” … “I didn’t act on it!”
