FKA twigs ‘Eusexua Afterglow’ Review: Basking in the Pleasure Principle

For an album whose title suggests a comedown from its predecessor’s euphoric high, the opening track of Eusexua Afterglow goes surprisingly hard. Backed by a relentless 4/4 throb, the fleeting “Love Crimes” finds FKA twigs equating corporal pleasure with mortality: “Your body’s a death trap/Precious like a teardrop.” She describes a man’s “love” as “venom” on the glitchy “Hard,” and tells him his touch is “hurting” her on “Touch a Girl.”

These are poetic appositions that twigs may want to consider unpacking with her therapist, but from a critical standpoint, they’re fascinating points of reference for a project that began as a handful of bonus tracks for an expanded edition of last winter’s Eusexua. The blissed-out single “Perfectly,” released over the summer, is curiously omitted here, while the breezy “Wild and Alone,” a reworked version of a previously leaked track, is notable primarily for managing to get PinkPantheress on a song that’s four minutes song and features a bridge.

Afterglow’s 11 songs bleed into each other, linking each one to a loose narrative through line that extends from Euseuxa, but it’s twigs’s psyche that emerges as the album’s fulcrum. On “Slushy,” she uses food to locate both emotional comfort (“A honeycomb, a bowl of rice/A shoulder to rest upon/Accoutrements, someone to phone”) and nostalgia (“Things that make me smile when my world falls down/Download them from my memory”) atop a bed of Eastern-coded keyboards and beats that skitter and shuffle as they grow in intensity.

The last few tracks form a mini song cycle, from “Sushi”—a ballroom anthem that sees twigs rapping couplets like the deliciously dumb “I wanna cinema somewhere outside/I wanna cinnamon bun on a bike” and the punny “Sushi, got me feelin’ fish tonight/Roll me into the midnight”—to the disorienting “Lost All My Friends.” The singer wades through her druggy brain fog and repetitive half-thoughts on the latter, searching for her friends at the club: “When I was alone, I was spinning…I don’t even remember who you are.”

Afterglow’s building blocks are the same as Eusexua’s: drum ‘n’ bass, swirling Ray of Light-esque arpeggios, and a preoccupation with pleasure, pain, and the human form. But the album also exists as a standalone work, with distinct elements like the distorted guitars and grindy synths that dirty up “Predictable Girl” and the shoegazy “Stereo Boy,” and indecipherably pitched-up vocals on tracks like “Cheap Hotel” that call fellow futurist Grimes to mind. And while Eusexua felt rooted in the moment, Afterglow is very much a reflection of what just happened.