In the pre-release livestream for her first album in five years, Arca spent the first few minutes on camera interacting with her fans in the online chatroom. She catalogued all the countries they were tuning in from, from Paraguay to Kazakhstan. The Venezuelan producer moved with the poise and confidence of a star at the peak of her career, a diva with an fan army of self-described Mutants who call her “madre.” She launched into a routine as elaborately staged as a mainstream pop artist’s halftime extravaganza, if a little more DIY: writhing on the back of a moving truck, climbing sand dunes in the dark, covering herself in blood, and getting her makeup done between songs. But rather than the avant-reggaeton or sinewy dance music of her five-album KiCK series, she played a challenging, mostly instrumental record of IDM rave-ups and confrontational club sounds. It was an inversion of the pop star performance for a post-SOPHIE world, where CDJs are instruments and songs need neither choruses nor discernible structures. It was Arca at her most Arca.
A Return to Form
XXXXX is an obvious successor to &&&&& and @@@@@, mixtapes that showcased the most freeform aspects of Arca’s musical personality. It was originally conceived as an entry in that series, until she decided to bestow on it the status of Full Album—a way to buck expectations and break the curse of trying to follow up an elaborately conceived five-LP statement. The result is an LP that feels like both a one-off and a leap forward, constantly code-switching between electronic freakouts that wouldn’t be out of place on the Planet Mu label and sultry club pop with the campy, prop-knife edge of electroclash.
The record is framed as a radio show on a station called Diva Experimental FM, with the occasional station tag and tracks that fade in and out like you’re listening to a particularly cracked-out DJ on a wee hours night drive. At its best, the imaginary radio station feels like a transmission from another world: The album peaks early with “Willow,” where a jerky trap beat slowly takes form, ticking hi-hats shooting out between the snares like steam from a release valve. Then it pivots into a dubstep beat with a trilling chiptune melody that drapes the edges, sounding a little like prime-era Zomby, but the whole thing is seasick and unpredictable, pirouetting around the quantized grid of dance music like Arca has always done so well.
Sonic Evolution and Influence
From there, we get grubby industrial (“Eidolon”), spiky art pop (the tongue-in-cheek come-ons of “Fxck”), and some truly avant-garde future shit, like “Syncope.” The heart-palpitating rhythms and glitchy stutters suggest some unholy mix of early Plastikman and Mark Fell, the vestiges of ’90s dance music reanimated into a herky-jerky Frankenstein’s monster. And “Finisher” is giving evil Fred again.., with hi-hats boasting a haphazardly hand-played feel that grow increasingly frantic as the track saunters along.
In some ways, XXXXX seems like a survey of what Arca might have been listening to lately. She recently interviewed 2hollis and expressed admiration for his music, and you can hear his influence (and maybe Skrillex’s) in the muscled EDM-rap of “Fxck.” I also hear the glory days of wonky, post-dubstep, and deconstructed club all over: “Raver” recalls the word-blotting broken beat of Jamie Vex’d, “Grip” channels the hi-tech EDM sound design of EPROM, and the hyperactive “Taneando”—which pleads, “I know you want me to come,” in Spanish over and over until it sounds like a threat—is something like a cybernetic upgrade of Jam City’s paradigm-shifting “The Courts.”
Those are helpful entry points, but Arca’s music also resists being compared to anyone else’s. She’s spent her whole career constructing an identity, and a sonic universe, from the ground up. Just look at the sleeve of XXXXX, the latest in her Giger-esque series of covers featuring cyborg-like beings, where her body is attached to what looks like some kind of tank or ship. It looks like how the music sounds: mechanistic but sinewy, caught smack dab in the middle of the transformation of person into machine.
There’s a through line all the way back to Arca’s first two mixtapes, Stretch 1 and Stretch 2, which put her on the radar of the underground dance music world before she crossed over into producing for Kanye, Björk, and Madonna. Those releases were queasy, dank, almost fetid, as though Ableton could manipulate flesh as well as frequencies. As her album artwork depicts, Arca has moved toward distinctly electronic and digital sounds, but the flesh persists, especially on XXXXX’s closing run. After “Everywhere,” a stuttery synth epic that ranks among Arca’s most emotionally stirring tracks, the LP ends with Arca screaming, distorted and Auto-Tuned, almost like a black-metal shriek: “STOP DYING!” It’s a desperate full-body plea, and feels like a harrowing moment of clarity, both moral and sonic, following 40 minutes of sonic confusion.