Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.FKA Twigs’s new album opens with the throb of a beat in a nightclub. That was the place where she first conceived of the project, dancing to techno during downtime in Prague while shooting her role in superhero movie The Crow. Alas for Twigs, the film took the wrong bird’s name. A box office flop on its release last year, The Crow turned out to be a turkey.What about Eusexua’s unusual title? It’s a term coined by the singer that puts one in mind of Thomas More’s Utopia, except with less clothing and fewer inhibitions, or perhaps an EU initiative to spice up the comity of European nations. Twigs (real name Tahliah Barnett) uses it to describe a rapturous state of being, a euphoric attunement between body, mind and cosmos. In her words, it’s the eureka moment “when you get a really good idea”, or “the moment before orgasm”.This idiosyncratic concept chimes with its creator’s career. Since releasing her debut album LP1 in 2014, Twigs has made a rarefied space for herself in which music acts as a binding agent between dance, high fashion, film and visual art. When all these elements join together successfully, the results bear comparison with exalted auteurs such as Björk. But when the synthesis doesn’t work, Twigs risks lapsing into empty stylisation.Eusexua opens strongly with its title track, a sleekly psychedelic dance anthem with pulsating energy and fluttering high vocals about enlightenment. The imprint of Madonna’s Kabbalah-infused Ray of Light is clearly discernible on “Girl Feels Good”, a delightful electronic pop mantra that gurgles and swooshes as though produced by William Orbit. The album’s actual producers are Twigs and collaborators drawn from experimental music, clubbing and mainstream pop (one of them, Marius de Vries, worked with Orbit on Ray of Light). “Perfect Stranger” cruises smoothly through the story of a one-night stand in the manner of The Weeknd. At the other extreme, “Sticky” is an introspective ballad about vulnerability with intricate vocal layering and a disruptive coda with crashing beats and bass. Twigs sings expressively, from airy murmuring to operatic trills. But Eusexua loses its way in its latter stages. “Childlike Things” is a cartoonishly cutesy J-pop-influenced affair with gaucheries about having “supersonic powers that are polyphonic”. “Striptease” aims for ecstasy but ends up as a snooze. The album struggles to sustain the heights that it reaches earlier on.★★★☆☆‘Eusexua’ is released by Young
