Oh, my gosh. Bigthony Scrufftano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. Hi, it's time for a review of this new FKA Twigs album, Eusexua.

We have the newest and third official solo studio album from singer, songwriter, actress, and dancer, FKA Twigs. It arrives over 10 years after her explosive introduction in the world of alternative RnB in the mid-2010s. That LP1 was handily one of the best albums of the decade, especially when it comes to that alternative RnB sound. And while Twigs may have been very much at the forefront of that trend during that time, she certainly was not dying by it because she quickly started experimenting with other genres, with M3LL155X, with Magdalene, as well as one of my personal favorites, the very versatile and peppy Caprisongs mixtape, which was her last major release, where she brought on a flurry of different genres, the usual mix of sounds, but also on top of that, glitch pop, art pop, trap, and some dance all too. And similarly, Twigs is pulling from a wide array of inspirations on this new album here. Let's just say she's in a very different location on the musical map, namely the rave.

Now, if you've been paying attention to the world of pop over the past year, especially alternative pop, you know that Y2K esthetics are back in a big way. Dance pop is back in a big way. I feel like on Eusexua, Twigs gives us her own spin on that sound. With a disparate set of songs to boot as they cover a lot of bases from the late '90s and early 2000s. Because we have touches of techno and IDM and trip hop held within the production of these tracks, as well as It's like some deconstructed club, I suppose, for the sake of throwing something new into the mix.

So yeah, this record, again, does cover a wide array of sounds, but maybe too wide for just 11 tracks because there are some pretty overt vibe switches along the run time of this album. I'm not sure if every song here would really work in the same overall DJ set, but I could see each of them working in various party and club contexts. We have cerebral entrancing techno with a great gradual build on the opening track, for example, which also doubles as a nuanced and gorgeous ballad with soaring super clean lead vocals that I think Caroline Polachek fans will appreciate. Björk fans, too.

I'm going to be honest, Björk seems like a pretty massive influence on this album with multiple tracks, really, specifically stuff from the Vespertine and the Homogenic eras. "Room of Fools" is a prime example of that, especially as Twigs digs aggressively into her lower range and yells a little bit, gets kind of aggressive. While I'm not exactly saying on this track that she's vocally on the same level as the queen herself, I got to give it to Twigs, she really does step up to the plate on this track and many others, and she's swinging. She is swinging like crazy. Really going for it and sounding great. And again, production-wise, continuing to touch down on a lot of different interesting sounds, on the very new agey outro of the track, which feels almost vaguely Enya-esque at points.

Then moving on to "Perfect Stranger", this track feels like just a very direct, sharply crafted piece of dance pop, which is just straightforward in all the best ways. "Drums of Death" has that booming, deconstructed club sound that I was referencing earlier. Some of the drums and noises on the track, the glitches have an industrial twist to them, too. While this track, I do really enjoy it. It is an odd man out on this album. It's not nearly as nuanced or as lengthy as a lot of the other cuts on this thing.

That's the main characteristic of this record, musically, you could say. It feels like each respective sound on this album, Twigs could have easily done an entire record based on any one of these esthetic but instead we just get a little bit of everything, much in the same way that we did on Caprisongs, but this time the tracklist is a little condensed down. The nods and musical references continue on to tracks such as "Sticky", too, where we have a low-key, intimate ballad with some stuttering piano melodies and vocal bits. There's something about the piano melody on this track that seems like it's in reference to Aphex Twin's, "Avril 14th".

There are some people saying it's a sample, though personally, I've not necessarily seen a liner note confirming that per se. I mean, an F-minor piano melodic progression isn't exactly difficult to come by. With that being said, though, even if this track does feature some original playing, I feel like there is clearly some musical poke going on here to such an amazing classic. And considering how much IDM stylistically impacts so many of the tracks on this record, come on, I feel like Aphex Twin is an obvious in.

Meanwhile, "Keep It, Hold It", sees Twigs referencing back to Kate Bush, but in a way that is much more over than anything she's done in the past, especially with these captivating group vocal chants. Eventually, the track escalates into this fiery dance midpoint where Twigs is just howling over these pumping kicks. Things eventually settle into some faint breakbeats and hushed vocals. It's just an amazing balance of art pop and IDM, too.

Now, we have to make a quick pit stop, though, for the track "Childlike Things", which has proven to be a bit of a speed bump for some fans in the tracklist because of just how unexpected the song is. And not just because of appearances from the likes of North West on this track. Yes, North Kardashian West is vocally on this track, singing/shouting in Japanese, no less. And the track is like a very peppy, upbeat, wild multicultural fusion of European dance pop and, again, like, "exotic" in quotes, Far East influences that would have been incorporated into a Gwen Stefani type smash back in the 2000s. I would go as far as to say it sounds like something from Grimes's Art Angels. Either way, I like the fact that Twigs can do something so unexpected. While it may seem a bit weird in the tracklist here as a song by itself in a vacuum, I feel like it's solid.

Moving on to the song "Striptease", which is a very seductive, flirty piece of trap-pop with lots of atmosphere. It's got some super woozy, intoxicating lead vocals that occasionally break into some elegant passages, too. This is most certainly something that would have popped off in the 2010s, but Twigs does her own little super weird, artful take on it that works quite well.

Now, look, across this review so far, I have illustrated a lot of musical and stylistic gaps from track to track. But what I will say, one super consistent thing is the vocals, which are very high quality much of the time. And on top of that, the emotions and major lyrical themes throughout the record, as a lot of the tracks on this thing work essentially as odes to troubled relationships, to difficult emotional situations, sexuality, and the dance floor, too.

The song "Sticky" is all about Twigs being sick of very difficult and hard to work through emotional and romantic situations. She even goes as far as to say she's pretty much messing up her life with these involvements, with these connections. We have similar vibes on the track "Perfect Stranger", which is all about being into somebody because they're essentially in this state of you not knowing anything about them, and that's what makes them so great. The song "Drums of Death" has heavy, heavy, heavy themes of just sexual liberation, loving without really having to think about love. On the title track, she admits to having taken her love too far in the past to the point where she ends up in a spot where she is at her wit's end and with no help from anyone in sight. The song "24hr Dog" may, on the surface, be very much about sexual submission, but there's a deeper drive and interest there to also relinquish power, which is also mentioned pretty directly on deeper lyrics within the song.

While I do think the closing track is a bit derivative in terms of its heavily autotuned talk singing throughout many of the verses of the track, which sound so BRAT. I was almost taken aback by the first few seconds of the song in terms of how much of a dead ringer it is for something off of that Charli album. But I do think lyrically this track does tie up the general themes of the album very well, as it seems like Twigs is trying to break down as many limitations and expectations for herself, personally speaking, going forward into the future. If you look at the tracklist of this album, as well as the tracklist of Caprisongs, too, it seems like you I would extrapolate that to what she's doing musically as well as she genre hops and genre hops and genre hops all over this project while still simultaneously very much keeping it dance a lot of the time.

So, yeah, overall here, in my opinion, I think we have a very quality, solid, beautiful record from Twigs. Once more, it's kind of fragmented and almost compilation-like in the way the Caprisongs was, but maybe not quite as consistently vibrant or fun or catchy. It's got a few pockets like that, but they're the rare exceptions to the general rules of this record, which are usually pretty subtle, moody, sensual, so Eusexua you could say, which is why I'm feeling a light eight on this album, I think.

Anthony Fantano. Twigs. Forever.