FKA twigs Tests Her Pop Skills on ‘Eusexua’

The first sound on “Eusexua,” the new album by FKA twigs, is a brisk, muffled thud, like the heartbeat behind a racing pulse. It’s a signal that on this LP, she is willing to deploy one of pop’s basic tools: a propulsive, danceable beat.

For more than a decade, FKA twigs — the English songwriter, singer, producer and dancer Tahliah Debrett Barnett — has defied the stereotyping that faces a Black woman making her own music. She hasn’t slotted herself into R&B, hip-hop or dance-pop; she has been an art-pop experimenter, with a high, clear soprano that reflects opera studies and an ear for long-breathed melodies and eerie, unsettled productions, often at dirge-like tempos. Although she has collaborated widely, her music has been more likely to rupture patterns than to maintain them.

Now, with “Eusexua,” FKA twigs turns partway toward pop. That’s far from unexpected; her scattershot 2022 collection “Caprisongs,” which was billed as a mixtape rather than an album, featured “Tears in the Club,” a collaboration with the Weeknd that was nearly as straightforward as its title.

The songs that are front-loaded on the first half of “Eusexua” are upbeat, flaunting their hooks. FKA twigs continues to work with the British electronic musician Koreless, a frequent collaborator since her 2019 album, “Magdalene.” But on “Eusexua” she has also enlisted co-producers who have worked with Madonna (Marius de Vries, Stuart Price, Jeff Bhasker) and other hitmakers.

The collaborators behind “Perfect Stranger,” which has already been released as a single, include Koreless, Price and the prolific, long-running Norwegian production team Stargate (Rihanna, Katy Perry, Sam Smith). It celebrates an anonymous hookup — “You’re a stranger so you’re perfect / I love the danger” — with neatly delineated verses and choruses and a pumping beat.

While “Perfect Stranger” is a conventional pop song — especially within the FKA twigs catalog — that hint of “danger” still fits into her longtime artistic narrative. From her first songs more than a decade ago, FKA twigs has presented herself as a “creature of desire,” as she sang in “Mary Magdalene.”