At the beginning of FKA twigs’ music video for her song ‘Eusexua’ – the title track of her third album, set for a January release – another song starts playing. In a nondescript office, twigs and her dancers, all dressed in monotone business casual, yank themselves from their desks and jerk their bodies around to tight choreography. They seem entranced, consumed by the booming, pulverising instrumental. This full song, ‘Drums of Death’, has been released a long two months after it was previewed in the ‘Eusexua’ video, and it is surreal.

Thunderous 808 beats kick their way into the listener’s ears amid an anthemic series of claps before starting to glitch and unravel like a copier machine going down a flight of stairs. twigs’ vocals, usually feather-light, are chopped up and processed within an inch of their life, oscillating through the instrumental robotically to a hypnotic effect. It is as though she has become part of the system itself, unable to give in to the dance.

When twigs finally blesses us with lyrics, there are a precious few. In what might be one of the most experimental ballroom/vogue tracks ever recorded, twigs commands the listener to ‘shed your skin / rip your shirt… crash the system diva doll’, alluding to the ‘Eusexua’ universe and making the track a worthy addition to its canon. (‘Eusexua’, an original term coined by twigs refers to ‘a feeling of momentary transcendence… bliss and feelings of limitless possibility.’)

Koreless, the British producer reported to have produced much of twigs’ upcoming album, supplies the instrumental, which masterfully builds and morphs as it hurtles toward its climax: a transcendent assault on the ears of bassy thuds and twigs’ synthetic voice. She asks ‘what you like? / do you wanna meet later?’ On paper, it is a gentle request. Here it sounds like a battle cry.

In the aforementioned music video, twigs confronts the viewer by staring down the barrel of the camera (taking a leaf from Cynthia Erivo’s book), instructing us to ‘relax and ease your mind’. Eusexua, it seems, is not a state one can tiptoe into, but rather lose oneself in entirely, giving over to the rhythm. An intimidating idea, perhaps, but if the music is this good, who are we to resist?

9/10

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