FKA twigs : EUSEXUA Afterglow
FKA twigs made EUSEXUA—one of 2025’s best albums by far—in part as an ode to the Prague techno scene and the liberating atmospheres it inspired. EUSEXUA Afterglow, its ostensible companion record, marries itself to the club aesthetic even more than its source.
It starts at blistering speed with the hard house of “Love Crimes” and doesn’t often let up the tempo until the more “conventionally Twigs” midtempo glitches and beats on “Piece of Mine.” You’re hip-deep in a deeply sensual hurricane of ecstatic movement and melody. You hear pulsing low end, synth pads creating sounds at once familiar and alien, and countless layers of vocal manipulation and sampling surrounding twigs’ actual (outstanding) voice. But like EUSEXUA itself, the Afterglow creates tactile sensations that go far beyond the auditory. It raises goosebumps and at times has you breathing sharply almost like a startle response.
Considering that EUSEXUA is a sexually frank record in various ways, Afterglow doubles down. The libertine celebration of “Cheap Hotel” “goes all night,” and I doubt they’re just dancing in its rooms. “HARD,” well, it’s exactly what you think—executed at the high level of artfulness few pop stars can reach. “Sushi” is even more assertive than EUSEXUA’s casual-sex anthem “Perfect Stranger” and arguably as good a song. FKA twigs has made sexually empowered music her whole career, but in an era of retrograde puritanical bullshit, we must congratulate her fearlessness.
Afterglow isn’t the near-perfect record I believe its predecessor to be. “Hotel” feels like little more than a trifle, seesawing between a slower downtuned (possibly sampled) rap refrain and hyperpop verses—or maybe the hyperpop is the chorus? Hard to tell. “Slushy” isn’t a trifle but it sounds like what you expect from a twigs song circa LP1, which generally hasn’t been true of her work since that album. And “Predictable Girl” may be consciously aping Nelly Furtado, but that feels uninspired compared to twigs’ usual reference points.
Despite its less exemplary moments, Afterglow is an arresting record. Though frequent collaborator Koreless is strangely absent from the credits, the production is rarely predictable. It matches twigs’ inherent shapeshifting by switching tempos, keys, pitches, and expectations on a dime, even while hewing often to hard techno as a ballast. Manni Dee, unknown to me until this record, has a credit on nearly every track; this establishes them as someone to keep an eye out for. (Bigger names like BOOTS, Stuart Price, Ty Dolla $ign, and The Weeknd’s secret weapons Illangelo and Doc McKinney only contribute to a track each.) While this Afterglow may remain in the shadow of its predecessor due to that album’s sheer excellence, it also shows how twigs never coasts and always moves to push the envelope.
Label: Young
Year: 2025
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