The first time I listened to Eusexua, FKA twigs’ third record, I couldn’t stop crying. This was not the first time trance and techno music has made me well up. It might sound strange that a BPM of around 125 could elicit such a reaction, but if these beats are designed to push the body to its limit, then tears are a sign of that urgent emotional relief. The album comprises 11 tracks, each designed to bring the listener’s attention toward their bodies in a deliberately mindful way, something twigs describes as her “somatic healing programme”. In such a way, its structure creates a sense of physical, spiritual, and musical catharsis. Like Charli xcx’s Brat, this is an album about sweaty skin, shaky walls and warehouse parties. Except, in the hedonistic world of Eusexua, the dancefloor is not merely about getting fucked up and feeling hot (no judgment here); it’s a matter of survival, healing from past traumas and letting go. 

Anyone familiar with twigs’ journey will know of the pain she has endured in recent years. In 2020, she filed a civil lawsuit against her former boyfriend, Shia LaBeouf, for domestic abuse. While creating her mixtape, Caprisongs, she privately reckoned with the effects of PTSD, using movement techniques she learned while training as a dancer to calm her fight-or-flight responses. Since then, she has spent her time trying to rebuild herself and her strength: “I’ve had to learn how to use, and how to live in, my body again” she explained in an interview with The Standard. This period follows a string of traumatic experiences, including her three-year relationship with Robert Pattinson, during which she faced relentless racist harassment from Twilight fans online. And in 2017, she was diagnosed with uterine fibroids, which she underwent surgery to remove. 

Critics have interpreted Eusexua as an ode to the clubs. They’re not mistaken: twigs claimed that she first felt “eusexua” – a word coined by the artist to describe the feeling of pure bliss and the sensation of losing oneself to something larger – at a rave in Prague. For me, though, the album is as much about the isolating, often unguided road to recovery: those first hopeless steps in a body forever changed, and the – hopefully – hard-earned, regaining of bodily autonomy on the other side. “[People] refused to help me”, confesses twigs in the album’s eponymous opening track, before juxtaposing her vulnerability with bittersweet hindsight: “I was on the edge of something greater than before / But nobody told me”. 

Carried by the slow, hypnotic strumming of a guitar, these lyrics set out one of the album’s crucial statements: healing requires patience, but in the end, contains the promise to transform (“I’m vertical sunrised / Like flying capsized / Free”). This idea is referenced most distinctly perhaps in “Keep It, Hold It,” the seventh track on the album. Here, the theme unfolds through a series of questions directed at the body – “What have I gotta do?” and “What have I gotta say?” – and answered with a soothing yet resolute tone: “Just keep it walking, keep it walking / Hold it close”. These lines are repeated like mantras, insisting on perseverance.

I know I am not alone when I say that I have experienced trauma because I am a woman, or because I am queer. No experience of mine has made this as obvious as two months ago when I had sexual reassignment surgery, fusing pain with my transition. I could take painkillers but it was, believe it or not, trance and techno music that gave me the strength to get through each day. A recent study shows that binaural beats that appear in this type of music can calm the nervous system and even be used to treat trauma patients. I don’t understand the science, but I can attest. 

In the hedonistic world of Eusexua, the dancefloor is not merely about getting fucked up and feeling hot – it’s a matter of survival, healing from past traumas, and letting go

I likely resonate with Eusexua because, though some parts are a blur, a trauma like this can never leave you. Fortunately, neither does your memory of the things that helped you heal – a blessing known to anyone who has experienced recovery, and one twigs’ intricately explores in her songwriting. “We’re open wounds”, the singer belts out in “A Room of Fools”, “Just bleeding out the pressure”. These lines are strange and visceral, painting images of injury laid bare. But, when set against a pounding bass, they become words about finding raw connection and a way to release pain in the mutual safety of the club. “We’re open wounds”, urges twigs. “The beautiful untether”. 

While the body can be restored, I don’t know if healing, in the fullest sense, is a process with a clear endpoint. Sometimes the uncertainty fills me with fear, probably because there’s an element of truth in the idea that we’re always healing from the past in one way or another. But, when I listen to Eusexua, I am reminded that I can live with those scars. From the empowering anthem “Girl Feels Good,” Eusexua’s ode to female sexuality, to the surreal introspection of the album’s closing track, “Wanderlust,” twigs demonstrates that aching can be a sign of transformation, and so a new life, too.