Inside Track: FKA Twigs 'Eusexua'

Photo: Eloise Parry

FKA Twigs has worked with many big‑name producers, but it was experimental electronic artist Koreless who guided the making of her new hit album Eusexua.

“The fact that FKA Twigs’ last album went to number three in the UK is huge for me,” says Koreless, aka Lewis Roberts. “I tend to think that I make comparatively obscure electronic music, so it is nice to see it resonate with so many people. I don’t know if I also speak for Twigs, but we did not try to make a hit album. My feeling is that if you try to do that, it never works. The best thing you can do is just make the best music you can. And people love Twigs for being Twigs. Just doing what you think is right is always a good place to be.”

Eusexua is the third and most successful full‑length album in a career that has seen FKA Twigs, aka Tahliah Barnett, collaborating with artists like A$AP Rocky, Kanye West, Skrillex, Jorja Smith, Fred again.., The Weeknd, The 1975, and more. She has also co‑produced and co‑written with big names such as Emile Haynie, Paul Epworth, Jack Antonoff, Sounwave, Cirkut, Mike Dean and Benny Blanco, alongside more obscure producers. Eusexua continues this trend, involving both heavyweight pop producers like Jeff Bhasker, Stuart Price, Ojivolta and Stargate and relative unknowns such as AOD, Tic, Eartheater, Felix Joseph and Koreless.

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Koreless was Twigs’ closest collaborator during the making of the album, much of which consists of abstract, futuristic electronic soundscapes. Both artists are signed to the same label, Young (formerly Young Turks), who initially brought them together. “I was brought in to work on her second album, Magdalene [2019], initially just to do some vocal effects. We ended up getting on quite well and we made a few songs together for the album. From there on we have been working together more and more, including on her mixtape Caprisongs [2022]. For Eusexua we spent a lot of time together.”

Eusexua is FKA Twigs’ third full‑length album.Roberts and Twigs are the only constants in the credits for every track on Eusexua, with Roberts the featured artist and sole producer on one, ‘Drums Of Death’. “Much of Eusexua came into being through writing camps. We did one in Ibiza, one in Big Sur in California, and some smaller ones in London. We’d invite a really mixed bag of collaborators, from really established songwriters to other artists. For example, Twigs found this guy on Instagram called Matteo Santini [@xquisite_korpse] who is a wizard on the Elektron Machines. We might do a long improvised jam with him and Twigs and maybe someone else from a totally different world, and we might cut a few songs out of that. We’d just write all day, really fast. We were working really, really fast in general. During the songwriting camps there’d be five or six ideas a day, for a week or two.

“I think the concentrated writing camps were a new process for Twigs. It certainly was a new process for me. If we just sat down together to write songs it could have become quite predictable, and we wanted to get out of that. She always wants to stir the pot and try interesting things. Writing camps are a good way of doing that. There’s definitely something great about two people sitting down and writing a song, and Twigs and I have written many songs like that. But many of the best moments on Eusexua came from crazy songwriting camps, with three or four people having live jams.”

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Roberts develops his ideas from his studio in rural Wales. “I’m always working here in Wales, always making stuff, not always full songs, just elements that I’m cataloguing and reassembling later. I like working on just one small sound or loop quite intensely before starting to think about turning it into a song. Sometimes giving these small elements attention means that they need less support in the context of a full arrangement. I have a big folder of these small elements, to be used as starting points, either on my own records or with other people.

Lewis Roberts’ studio in rural Wales is set up to give him the feeling of listening on a gigantic pair of headphones.

“My studio is in an annexe to the house. It’s a bit cobbled together, and it’s not the best room, to be honest. I like a really dead room, with monitors very close. I like to feel like I’m inside a pair of headphones. The walls are heavily treated acoustically, so it sounds good to me in here now. My monitors are ATC SCM 45As. I feel they’re too big for me, but they’re cool. I was getting a lot of weird ringy stuff bouncing off the back wall, so I tried placing them on window ledges and boxing them off into a makeshift pseudo‑soffit to stop the back wall reflections and that seems to work. They’re not properly soffit‑mounted for speaker boundary stuff, but the response is flatter and the stereo image is cleaner. They feel closer and more like a pair of headphones. I just got the Antelope Orion 32 as an interface. I like that it has lots of inputs, and it sounds good. I‘ve also recently got a few racks of outboard, an old AMX 1580 pitch‑shifter and delay that I absolutely love, the Alan Smart C2 compressor, some Thermionic Culture units, like the Rooster tube mic pre/EQ, and more.”

After trying his hands at Ableton in his early years, Roberts abandoned the DAW, only to reconnect with it later on. “I left Ableton for a while because it didn’t do a lot of the things I wanted it to do. I had a brief detour using Reaper, and then moved to Pro Tools. Ableton has rectified many of the issues I had with it in more recent updates, so I’m using it again. And I still use Pro Tools.

Koreless: I often have really long crazy effect chains, and smash everything together through compressors.

“I like writing in Ableton because of Max/MSP and the MIDI/MPE editor. I’m pretty fast with it now....