FKA twigs mounts a dancer on all fours and rides him across the stage. “It feels nice,” the artist born Tahliah Barnett coos in her breathy, pixie voice. A group of pulsating performers surround her, two-stepping to the glitchy techno beat of “Room of Fools”. The song appears on her club-inspired third album Eusexua, a term the 37-year-old coined to describe an enlightened state of clarity and freedom, like the “moment before an orgasm”.
“Eusexua” might not have had the same impact as Charli XCX’s “Brat”, but Eusexua the album – Twigs’s first to reach the Top 10 in the UK – marks the pop star’s wildly successful pivot to club music. It follows a knockout promotional campaign that has seen her trapped in cages inside east London warehouse raves, dancing in Severance-style offices and posting soliloquies from her bathtub. She sounds right at home on the album, planting her experimental flag into a nightclub’s sticky dance floor. One giant leap.
