A polished glass vitrine loomed inconspicuously on the dancefloor—until a sound tech crawled beneath it, vanishing into a tangle of electrical wiring. The steel-framed hexagon was built specially for the New York edition of FKA twigs’ Eusexua rave, which stretched from Saturday night until Sunday morning at Bushwick, Brooklyn, party space the Chocolate Factory. At first, the figure’s high-shine panes served as a kind of funhouse mirror, where revelers gazed at their dancing reflections or posed for selfies amid the piped-in fog. Only later in the evening, deep into pummeling techno sets by DJs Young Male and Meilgaarden, did the crowd amass around the vessel, watching as a fluorescent light twitched awake every few minutes. Was twigs already inside?
Following similar club nights in London and Los Angeles, the event was part of FKA twigs’ ongoing rollout for her forthcoming album Eusexua, which lands January 24. Her formal follow-up to 2019’s Magdalene includes contributions from Koreless, Eartheater, Stargate, and Stuart Price, all of whom co-produced alongside the singer, dancer, and pop visionary. She debuted the title track during a Valentino show at Paris Fashion Week last year, gesticulating in sand-filled cubes as models stalked the runway. But we didn’t glimpse the mood board until this spring, when twigs sat for an interview with British Vogue and revealed that her new body of work was inspired by the underground dance parties she frequented while filming the Crow remake in Prague. At one rave, while holed-up in the bathroom of a derelict building, she scrawled “EUSEXUA” on the back of her hand.
But what does it mean, this word of twigs’ own invention? “It’s like when you’ve been kissing a lover for hours and turn into an amoeba with that person,” she told British Vogue. “Or that moment before an orgasm.” What she found dancing on the outskirts of Prague was a sudden clarity that struck after months of brain fog and years of personal strife. The Eusexua raves have recreated the raw industrial spaces in which twigs found sanctuary. (The London and Los Angeles parties were held at the Cause and Catwalk, respectively.) All three events have solicited the same enigmatic dress code: “An unearthed nude expression birthed upon scorched soil and steel…Colors and textures are scarcely seen in this vision of a world with euphoric clarity. Take me to the pinnacle of human experience, take me to EUSEXUA.”
Translation? In Bushwick, that meant toned torsos, fishnets, tits-out, platforms, leather daddies, assless chaps, and oh-so-many beige drugstore tights masquerading as shirts. Clouds of mist impaired visibility at the top of the evening, especially for the throngs bedecked in black shades—and one gentleman in his horned gimp mask. Opposite all that Cenobite-chic was a more ethereal sect: tiers of soft nude ruffles; a man in nothing but a gauzy Roman loincloth; the three oracles draped in diaphanous white veils, swaying around the glass case in some kind of trance. Their apparent leader had a shaved dome and a large red circle blazing at the center of their forehead. It looked like they were trying to summon twigs with some arcane kinetic ritual.
