Arca – A New Grammar for Imagining the Future

The early experiments of a young Ghersi

During the 2010s, a good number of enlightened producers took on the complex task of forging a new grammar for electronic music. A path of radical deconstruction of the material that gave rise to a strand known as "post-club": sound design in the service of dance music, for an unprecedented experimental club music. Some agitators of the scene, such as Arca, Holly Herndorn, Aisha Devi and Amnesia Scanner, managed to gain relevance, consideration and authority, thanks to their ability to decompose and rethink the world of beats through an unprecedented vision, with an attitude we might call "punk", renewing a vocabulary that had long been stagnant and relaunching it towards unknown scenarios still waiting to be explored and deciphered.
Alejandra Ghersi Rodriguez, born Alejandro in 1989 in Caracas, Venezuela, moved to New York at eighteen to study at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. She had already begun making eccentric bedroom music, with a fragmented sound receptive to countless influences, the inevitable result of the young Ghersi's travels and curiosity. She composed tracks of abstract electronic music using cracked samples gathered online: sifting through mountains of audio material soon became her favourite pastime.

She first appeared on the music scene in 2006, under the pseudonym Nuuro, used to release two albums of still-"conventional" songs, All Clear (2006) and The Reddest Ruby (2009), plus a series of EPs marked by a still very immature electropop, melodic and dreamy, influenced as much by avant-garde artists like Bjork and Aphex Twin as by Venezuelan pop music rooted in tradition. The Nuuro project achieved modest success within the Venezuelan indie circuit, getting played on several local radio stations and featuring in a few youth-oriented ad campaigns, earning a certain degree of popularity.

In 2011, sensing that this melodic, conventional pop no longer reflected her identity and her drive to experiment, Ghersi decided to let chaos into her songwriting, marking a decisive turning point in her career. From that moment on, her stage name changed to Arca.
Her very first release, in 2011, was the mixtape Baron Foyel, followed in 2012 by the EPs Barón Libre, Stretch 1 and Stretch 2, released on the New York label UNO. These projects represent the genesis of Ghersi's new mutant sound, marking the beginning of her evolution from chrysalis to butterfly, laying the groundwork for what would soon be recognised as "her" electronic sound: hybrid, abstract, deconstructed. Both Baron Foyel and Baron Libre contain the track "Little Now A Lot", a sample of which would be used in 2018 to compose "Arisen My Senses", a track co-written and co-produced with Bjork for the album "Utopia".
Released in April 2012, the EP Stretch 1 moves along downtempo coordinates, at times rarefied, recalling the dark atmospheres of Burial and Massive Attack. "Doep" is trip-hop that looks to the style of Tricky, "Focus" is a brilliant example of a track stuffed with crooked sounds (listen out for the piano), slowed-down beats and manipulated vocals, "Ass Swung Low" a visionary experiment in stripped-down dubstep.
Stretch 1 marks a decisive leap forward from the Nuuro phase: we're still within the "song" format, but the approach trawls through the last twenty years of electronic music to synthesise it and hurl it towards tomorrow, fusing experimentation with melody.
Stretch 2, released in August 2012, completes this transitional period, revealing a further evolutionary step. Arca shows confidence and artistic maturity in bending genres to her will, combining warped hip-hop beats, unstable rhythms and alien vocals for a claustrophobic yet deeply harmonic sonic journey.
The opening is jagged and aggressive: "Self Defense" starts as if it were a Prodigy track, the intro of "Fortune" seems lifted straight from Prince, but the overall atmosphere is oppressive, non-linear, full of sharp-edged sounds. After the obsessive "2 Blunted", the central part of Stretch 2 takes on a distinctly hypnotic quality, with the rhythms slowing down, edging towards a kind of futuristic psychedelia that reaches its zenith in the two closing tracks, "Meditation" and "Manners" (the kora plucking is gorgeous, sampled from the track "Salaman" by Toumani Diabaté and Ballaké Sissoko, from the 1999 album "New Ancient Strings"), a true delight for listeners who manage to get through the more demanding passages laid out by the earlier tracks.
Arca's commitment begins to be about pushing sounds to the limit, making them elastic, ensuring tracks mutate abruptly and unpredictably: melancholic one moment, utterly psychotic the next. It's clear that her primary goal is certainly not to put the listener at ease, but rather to challenge them, surprise them, annihilate them.

A further upgrade comes through the hybridization of IDM and hip-hop beats achieved on &&&&& (pronounced Ampersand), originally released as a free download on SoundCloud in July 2013 as a self-produced mixtape, and later issued on physical format in 2020 via PAN.
&&&&& represents the first turning point in Arca's career, the moment where she begins breaking the boundaries of traditional beatmaking to help codify the grammar of what would come to be called "deconstructed music," an alternative way of describing the post-club "genre-that-isn't-a-genre." Made alongside the writing and production of four tracks on Kanye West's "Yeezus," &&&&& is a 25-minute flow split into 14 short tracks, accompanied by the unsettling digital imagery created by visual artist Jesse Kanda. It's still a fragmentary work, but one in which Ghersi's ideas already begin to come into focus: take the rhythmic schemes of hip-hop, reggaeton, dubstep and grime, reduce them to rubble, and extract the bare bones.
Arca decomposes, deforms, lurches forward in fits and starts, interrupts, lets sub-harmonic basses explode, then sudden silences, restarts, metallic percussion, twisted sheet metal. Club music is torn to pieces, fused with industrial, and reassembled through an entirely new sensibility. What strikes most is the stylistic variety, as if we were inside a blender of musical genres.
Arca also proves adept at alternating sonic aggression with moments of pure grace, with synthesizers crafting melodies rich in decadent accents, enriched by spectral piano notes that push right up to the border with chamber music. The human voice appears in the form of unrecognizable vocal samples, stretched, slowed down or sped up to excess. The sound is never static: every element seems alive, organic, in constant mutation and decay.
Anticipating the explicit themes of gender fluidity and bodily mutation that would go on to define her later steps, &&&&& lays down the visual and conceptual foundations, a calling card for Arca's technological universe, within which one can already glimpse what it would later become. Not too disturbing, though: on &&&&& nothing is yet pushed to the point of exasperation, Arca produces a nocturnal, urban sound, at times dramatic, moving between hip-hop, dubstep and ambient, suitably disfigured. Too warped to be considered "pop," not yet avant enough to define the sound of the future, though it can be glimpsed in flashes, among the machine-gun rhythms (soon to become a trademark) of "Obelisk," laid over soft neoclassical piano, a "Pinch" that verges on avant-jazz territory, and "Coin," which comes across as a psychedelic drift recalling the work of Flying Lotus.

Also in 2013, Arca shapes the sonic identity of hugely important and successful works from behind the scenes. She handles production on "The Redeemer," the debut album by British musician Dean Blunt, and also produces and co-writes every track on FKA Twigs's "EP2," and, before these projects, as already mentioned, takes part in writing and producing four tracks on Kanye West's "Yeezus."
When West discovers Arca's mixtapes, he urgently brings her on as a production consultant for the album he's working on. Many of the deconstructed, industrial beats on "Yeezus" derive directly from Arca's sonic sketches. On the track "Hold My Liquor" Arca appears as lead co-producer: the synthetic textures, distorted basses and deconstructed sonic details underpinning the vocals of Chief Keef and Justin Vernon bear her signature throughout. On "Blood On The Leaves" and "Send It Up" Arca works side by side with Kanye West to manipulate the rhythmic structure, bringing in the metallic, aggressive sound typical of her aesthetic at the time. She also appears as co-producer on "I'm In It."
These prestigious collaborations start getting Arca widely talked about among music fans and industry insiders, even more so than her early releases under her own name. They remain seminal works, reference points that many other artists would look to with curiosity and a spirit of emulation, in some cases asking Ghersi herself to step in personally to achieve similar results.

Fundamental contributions to defining the concept of "post club"

A few months pass, and in 2014 Mute Records releases Xen, widely regarded as Arca's first proper album, the manifesto of an entire aesthetic revolution. Ghersi transfigures their own psyche, conceiving a disorienting, fluid and radically personal work. The album's title comes from Xen, a genderless avatar, the non-binary visual alter ego created in close collaboration with digital artist Jesse Kanda, by then a regular collaborator of the Venezuelan producer. Imagined as a humanoid, androgynous figure with sinuous, deformed shapes, Xen is the record's visual and conceptual throughline, representing gender neutrality, liberation from the constraints of the physical body, and the tangible embodiment of an identity-driven anxiety transmuted into art.
In the songs that make up Xen, technology becomes an emotional, organic prosthesis, living flesh, the means through which to demolish the conventional structures of club electronics and then reassemble them into a mutant, asymmetrical, unpredictable form. Twisted synthesizers, metallic percussion and basses compressed to the point of distortion appear everywhere, yet beneath this abrasive surface a decadent romanticism constantly emerges. A contrast between violence and grace that goes so far as to embrace the influence of chamber music and classical piano, contaminated by micro-sampling and exasperated pitch-shifting. The melodies remain suspended in a constant sense of vulnerability, for now devoid of the human voice, which is almost entirely absent or reduced to indecipherable spectral fragments: it is the architecture of the synthesizers themselves that becomes voice, scream, breath.
The manipulation of timbres and the handling of sonic space are masterful. The sound design feels revolutionary, leaving an impression of three-dimensionality. "Thievery" offers an early revisiting of reggaeton, a synthesis that will be perfected on later albums; "Held Apart" retains the neoclassical purity of Sakamoto; "Xen" and "Tongue" flirt with industrial; on "Family Violence" the frantic movement of the strings conjures up a scene of raw drama; "????? A" and "????? B" are two bonus tracks included a few months later on an expanded edition, retitled "???? Edition".
One of the main reasons Xen is so memorable is that it stands as one of the first avant-garde electronic albums of the 2010s to translate themes of gender fluidity and bodily mutation into pure musical structure, playing a decisive role in elevating Arca to a banner-carrier for queer culture. Despite its strong visual-sonic coherence (the union of Arca's productions and Jesse Kanda's animations produces one of the decade's most successful multimedia pairings), the total absence of traditional structures, combined with the short, fragmentary flow of the tracks, makes the album a genuinely challenging listen. Nevertheless, Xen is recognized as one of the founding pillars of the "post-club" sound, a pivotal moment in the evolution of contemporary experimental electronic music, a manifesto of mutant beauty that not only helped define the sound of years to come, but also paved the way for an unfiltered, uncompromising exploration of queer expression, capable of reflecting both a profound sense of anxiety and liberation.

But this is merely a bridge toward the uncontainable, demanding Mutant, released in November 2015, Arca's most forbidding album, an unstable organism in constant flux, through which Ghersi expands and radicalizes the insights of the previous record, almost entirely abandoning the traditional song form to embrace a sculptural, deeply emotional chaos. The work presents itself as a genuine exploration of identity, body and transformation. From the opening track, "Alive" (strobing jungle with a melancholy ambient undercurrent), the listener is thrust into a soundscape where granular synthesis, metallic percussion, convulsive rhythms and abstract melodic fragments coexist in constant tension.
The tracks don't follow classic structures: they're born, branch out, collapse in on themselves and mutate shape without warning, making the album's title a perfect statement of intent. Arca, by now fully aware of their goals and in complete command of their means, manipulates sound with surgical precision; the use of distorted basses, organic samples, industrial noise and extreme frequencies creates an evocative, cubist-edged texture.
But the real strength of Mutant lies in its ability to alternate moments of pure sonic aggression (as in the seven and a half minutes of the title track, a wildly slowed-down and deformed club-music tapestry that charts a journey of transformation, from initial anxiety to final ecstasy) with flashes of poignant beauty and vulnerability ("Sinner", with its suspended piano notes, "Else", almost an exercise in chamber music). In a setting that's continually self-sabotaging yet rich with sophisticated ideas, there's also room for post-dubstep moves ("Vanity", "Snakes", "Enveloped"), echoes of futuristic ethno-folk ("Umbilical") and ambient music built from extended sample loops stretched into drones ("Hymn", "Extent").
The length (over an hour) and the fragmentary nature of the twenty tracks certainly don't make for an easy listen, but the record has the merit of maintaining an impressively coherent narrative, guiding the listener through a state of constant metamorphosis. An essential work for understanding the evolution of deconstructed club music and avant-garde electronics in the 2010s, confirming Arca as one of the boldest, most visionary minds in contemporary music.

Also in 2015, Arca continues in parallel their maze of collaborations, making a significant contribution to Björk's album "Vulnicura", released on 20 January. Arca steps in on songs and string arrangements already written by Björk, helping translate the pain of her divorce into sound, carving out dark, asymmetrical, fractured electronic beats that bleed like open wounds, in contrast with the solemnity of the strings. Epic, harrowing tracks like "Black Lake" and "Family" bear the signature of the metallic, evocative sound design typical of early Arca, credited as co-producer on seven tracks and co-writer on two.
That same year, Arca handles production, recording and mixing, and contributes to the writing of two tracks on the EP "Hallucinogen" by US singer Kelela, released in October. Arca also collaborates with stylist and musician Shayne Oliver, forming the duo Wench: together they compose Sheep, seventeen minutes of industrial plastics and samples blending everything from Björk to Robert Wyatt, music used by fashion label Hood By Air as a backdrop for an event hosted at Pitti Uomo. In 2017 they would release two more tracks, "Elmo" and "Sick", exclusively for Tidal.
In July 2016 Arca releases the mixtape Entranas, preceded by the single "Sin rumbo"; around the same time they collaborate with Frank Ocean on the track "Mine", included on the visual album Endless, released on 19 August.

The elusive Alejandra: ever-shifting perspectives

With their self-titled third album, released on 7 April 2017, Arca marks a new, radical and intimate turning point in their artistic path. Having previously defined a sound made of deconstructed electronics, industrial percussion and abstract soundscapes, Arca (the album) shifts the focus toward the human element, revealing its creator in all her vulnerability. This time the Venezuelan producer abandons almost exclusively instrumental solutions to bring the voice back to the center of the work, singing mostly in Spanish and drawing on the tradition of Venezuelan tonada and the most mournful love songs. The result is a lyrical, deeply cathartic work, in which pain, sensuality and emotional devotion merge into a single listening experience.
Arca's voice, unsweetened by excessive ornamentation but pushed into dramatic, expressive registers ("Miel"), dominates the scene, delivering lyrics steeped in desire and suffering, turning the album into an open-hearted confession, a heart that bleeds. The production doesn't abandon the metallic timbres or extreme frequencies of the past ("Urchin" is a fine example), but softens them through near-operatic synthesizers, spectral strings, and a majestic use of space and silence. With Jesse Kanda's renewed visual contribution, the album builds a powerful imagery in which the mutated, wounded body becomes a metaphor for rebirth and self-acceptance.
Arca is the album of mature expressive awareness: a perfect meeting point between the sonic avant-garde dictated by contemporary electronics ("Castration") and the melodramatic tradition of Latin pop ("Desafio"), a work that definitively establishes its creator among the most influential and visionary figures in modern music. All of this achieved through a song form folded in on itself, pained, liturgical, light years away from the club, firmly rooted in a leaden, purgatorial terrain.
The opening "Piel" and "Anoche" immediately set the terms of the contest, with that pained forward motion, like a slow procession, and lyrics steeped in deep introspection. The approach pushes so far it risks feeling (to some) inconclusive: in truth, what's being paid for here is the choice to give the project a clear, uncompromising direction, never looking back with regret at the pace set during the making of previous works.

That same year Arca once again collaborates with Björk, co-producing every track (and co-writing five of them) on the album "Utopia". Unlike the previous record, the two artists work together from day one. Arca pushes Björk to explore airier, more abstract sonorities, blending the liquid synths played by Arca themself and their floating rhythms with an orchestra of Icelandic flutes and field recordings captured in the Venezuelan forest. Tracks like "Arisen My Senses", "Blissing Me" and the title track itself show a complete fusion between Arca's mutant electronics and Björk's celestial voice.
In October 2017 Arca renews their collaboration with Kelela too, producing four tracks (co-writing two of them) for the highly acclaimed debut album "Take Me Apart".

In 2018 they take part in the soundtrack for the video game "Red Dead Redemption II", alongside Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Colin Stetson, collaborating in particular with composer Woody Jackson on the track "Country Pursuits". From 25 to 28 September 2019 they present their new, still-unreleased album at The Shed in New York, in a performance titled "Mutant: Faith", divided into four acts (Gestation, Aftercare, Ripples, Boundary), which Björk also takes part in. That same year they collaborate again with Frank Ocean on the remix of "Little Demon", made together with Skepta.
Also in 2018, they come out as non-binary, later identifying as a trans woman and stating a preference for the pronouns "she" or "it". From Alejandro, they definitively become Alejandra. After living in London for several years, they move to Barcelona.

After the immersion into the most aching introspection charted in the grooves of Arca, in February 2020 Alejandra Ghersi releases a mixtape on their own YouTube channel, later made available digitally via XL Recordings, @@@@@, a monster single, a sprawling experimental suite lasting sixty-two minutes and twenty seconds (!!), conceived as a single, uninterrupted stream of sonic consciousness, a track in constant mutation, with which Arca returns to playing with rhythm. Among the most radical, complex and extreme points in the entire Venezuelan artist's discography, the concept develops around the idea of a pirate radio frequency broadcast from a dystopian, post-human world, a parallel universe dominated by the oppressive force of an authoritarian regime led by a cybernetic alter ego, Diva Experimental.
We're at the sonic antipodes of the previous album, and from the first minutes Arca dismantles every norm of contemporary music consumption: there are no separate tracks, no pauses, no formal structure to hold onto. On the cover, the Venezuelan producer appears as an entity whose humanity has already been overtaken by the world of machines, a perfect depiction of a (post-club) sound ready to welcome, within its own orthodoxy, all the anomalies injected by a reckless, experimental use of electronics.
@@@@@ is a fresh showcase of sound-design mastery, in which Arca blends deconstructed music, industrial noise, disfigured reggaeton fragments, operatic melodies and electronic glitches with astonishing fluidity. The shift from moments of pure percussive aggression to phases of ethereal suspension happens organically yet unpredictably. Arca's voice, treated as just another synth, fragments into a thousand pieces, between spoken-word passages in Spanish, dramatic high notes, whispers, screams, pitched manipulations, lending force to themes of transition, gender fluidity and the hybridization of man and machine.
In this deconstructive fury, Arca pushes forms and timbres to the extreme, deforming every known structure, leaning into a kind of cubist abstraction. In @@@@@ one can trace the hallmarks of a now-unmistakable style, a mirror of our frantic, hallucinated times, a perfect link between the sculptural electronics of the early days (especially Mutant) and the monumental Kick pentalogy that would follow soon after — and may already have been in the works: @@@@@ indeed contains some of the ideas, chaos and melodies that would soon take an even more fully realized, structured form. It's a demanding, monolithic listening experience, overwhelming in its own way, confirming Arca among the boldest, most unfiltered and visionary avant-garde figures of the electronic scene (and beyond) in the twenty-first century.

The Kick cycle: Arca's manifesto

At this point in their career Arca is an unstoppable force in full flow, and between 2020 and 2021 they release their absolute masterpiece, a five-volume project, Kick, through which they enter a new era that we might call "non-binary pop", merging in a highly personal way a multitude of only seemingly irreconcilable genres, some drawn from the tradition of their home country, others borrowed from classical music. It might look like nothing new in their discography, but on Kick Arca reaches a level of perfection and visionary ambition never achieved before.
Latin rhythms and opera, cyber reggaeton and sacred music go hand in hand amid sexual tension, death, rebirth and provocation, with the traumas and fragilities of anyone navigating a transition front and center, including iconographically. Arca takes the sounds of dance music and upends them, breaking them down into their prime factors and reassembling them according to a new hyper-modernist aesthetic, forging a deep bond with the visual arts and highlighting the no-longer-postponable need to move beyond the rigid, schematic 4/4 of electronic music, of Berghain and Ibiza nights, shifting the paradigms of a language that had long been slowly crumbling, demanding to be steered toward new paths. Arca becomes a symbol of change, but also a muse, leaning into unpredictable rhythms, flashes of avant-garde daring, and the bold juxtaposition of so many genres that seem almost to form a non-genre, between futuristic visions and the defragmentation of tradition, between pathos and aching ballads.
Kick is a complex, encyclopedic project, in which each of the five acts that make it up is defined by its own particular focus, a tonal scale running from the relative accessibility of the first two volumes toward the more sorrowful later ones. Culture, identity, belonging, non-binary messages expressed through a postmodern theatricality by an artist hyper-connected to the future, sketching avant-garde scenarios: the Kick series, at times a touch self-celebratory, packs in almost three and a half hours of experiments and anguish, during which Arca appears now as a cat, now a witch, now a submissive, now a dominatrix, now a saint, now a sinner: flagellating and seducing, staging a performance with the flavor of ritual, going well beyond any conceivable definition. EDM and industrial-techno mix with the genres Alejandra grew up with, the typically South American ones, allowing room for the occasional potentially radio-friendly flourish (the "Prada"/"Rakata" one-two will remain central to their discography), and welcoming numerous guests ready to lend further eclecticism to something already unclassifiable in its own right. Björk, Rosalía, SOPHIE, Shygirl, Sia, Shirley Manson all lend strength to the work of an outraged singer-songwriter navigating a world still, in the end, unable to fully grasp Arca's talent and artistry, and the unfathomable unease of a producer who operates outside every framework, the protagonist of a truly singular artistic journey. On Kick, Alejandra Ghersi's life and work become indissolubly fused: delirium, farce, tragedy, spleen, self-celebration, nighttime walks through the streets of Barcelona, club sweat, fetish outfits, the hunger to devour the world, the suffering, the goal of destructuring genres (musical and otherwise) and moving beyond definitions.

The gestation of the five creatures of the Kick cycle unfolds in stages, starting with the video performance "Fetiche" back in 2018, and continuing through Frederick Heyman's video work that accompanies @@@@@. Three years later, Heyman himself will oversee the visuals for Kick, modeling a 3D avatar on Ghersi, a "surrealist" DJ with the look of a fetish-cyberpunk doll. The creative process behind this new Arca-centric universe, where aesthetics and work remain inseparable, extends into social media, through the Radio Diva Experimental broadcast, while on Instagram a documentary-style stream of reflections and statements reconstructs the gender transition Ghersi went through. A painful journey, consciously turned into a source of strength.

During the pandemic months Arca releases a couple of DJ mixes: ^^^^^ [Circumflex], broadcast on NTS Latest, and ±±±±± [Plus-minus], on BBC Radio. On 16 December of that same year, Riquiquì; Bronze-Instances (1-100) arrives on digital platforms, a remix album made up of one hundred (!!!) versions of the track "Riquiquì" generated using artificial intelligence.
In January 2021 Arca releases the EP Madre. In July of that year they compose the soundtrack for artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen's installation Berl-Berl, presented by the Berlin-based foundation LAS, in which their operatic voice is combined with recordings of amphibian sounds drawn from the archives of the Natural History Museum. Also in 2021 Arca co-produces the single "Tears In The Club" by FKA Twigs and The Weeknd, released as the first single from the mixtape "Caprisongs", and contributes to the album's closing track, "Thank You Song".
On 3 September 2021, Arca's remix of "Rain On Me" by Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande is released, included on "Dawn Of Chromatica". In 2021 they also release a remix of "Let Us Dance" by Beverly Glenn-Copeland, collaborate with Sega Bodega on the track "Cicada" (included on "Romeo"), and, together with Rosalía, curate the MOTOMAMI Los Santos radio station for the GTA video game series.

From 31 December 2021 to 31 January 2022, a number of Arca's works are projected in cities around the world (Los Angeles, London, Melbourne, Milan, New York, Seoul, Tokyo), based on thirty-one paintings that are continuously reworked by artificial intelligence to create ever-new images.
In 2022 they release the singles "Cayò", written with Tim Hecker, "El alma que te trajo" in collaboration with fellow Venezuelan producer Safety Trance (which will become one of Arca's most popular tracks), and "Ritual", later included in the Kick collection. They also release a remix of "Big Science" by Laurie Anderson and produce the single "Come From Me" from Shygirl's album "Nymph", with whom they collaborate again the following year on "Unconditional", which will end up on the deluxe edition of that same "Nymph".
In July 2022, an installation based on a reinterpretation of "Tonada de Luna Llena" by Venezuelan composer Simón Díaz debuts at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, created by Arca using the Bronze AI artificial intelligence system. The composition is continuously altered based on biometric and climate data collected inside and outside the museum. In August, Arca presents Greatest Hits '88 to '16 on NTS Radio, a collaborative album made with Shayne Oliver as part of the Wench project.

On 8 June 2023 Arca opens for Beyoncé's concert in Barcelona, on a tour for which they also help create some of the visual content. That same month they work as producer on the track "Suicide Doors", featured on US rapper Lil Uzi Vert's album "Pink Tape", and appear as producer and guest on "Pasiempre", on Puerto Rican producer Tainy's debut album "DATA". In October they present "Mutant: Destrudo" at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, a multidisciplinary performance made up of four shows blending music, visual arts and new technologies. A recording of the performance of the single "Incendio" was later released as a music video on the artist's YouTube channel, in which Arca's face and facial movements are controlled by myoelectric sensors.
In March 2024 they headline "The Light Comes In The Name Of The Voice" at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, an event combining a site-specific performance, their first exhibition of paintings, and a DJ set. That same year they release the single "Chama", a duet with Tokischa, as well as a remix of Addison Rae's hit "Aquamarine" and of Utada Hikaru's track "Electricity".

14 May 2025 marks the start of a new artistic phase with the release of the double single, and accompanying promotional videos, "Puta" / "Sola", Arca's first solo project after the Kick era.
In 2026 Arca produces remixes of Robyn's "Sexistential" and Nine Inch Nails' "As Alive As You Need Me To Be", appears as a guest on Safety Trance's single "The Beat Drops", included on the album "Sacrificio", and contributes to production and programming, as well as playing synths, on two tracks from Madonna's album "Confessions II", "I Feel So Free" and "The Test", also appearing in the accompanying promotional film. In April 2026 their second solo painting exhibition takes place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

The long-awaited return

On July 17, 2026, the Dj mix “Airdoll” is released in simulcast on more than twenty international radio stations. Three days later, through her own social media channels, Arca announces the release of the new album XXXXX, due out on July 31, also revealing the album's cover art. On July 23, a roughly two-hour performance directed by Daniel Sannwald is streamed live on the artist's Twitch and YouTube channels, conceived as a preview of the new album.

After numerous collaborations that have also involved artists from the mainstream circuit, with XXXXX (as happens with every work released under her own name) Alejandra Ghersi Rodriguez wipes the slate clean of any pop or star-driven drift, retreating once again into an almost merciless intransigence, into that form of stubborn experimentalism through which, album after album, she has refined a clear positioning of her own image.
XXXXX takes no prisoners: it's the product of a researcher intent on continuing her meticulous work of dissecting the very matter of the song. There's no pursuit of consensus here, only the firm intention to leave significant traces of her own passage, elevating herself to a source of inspiration for future generations. In fact, five years after Kick (which also featured a few attempts to soften the proposal), Arca reclaims her own language in an even more radical way, through a demanding album built on constant rhythmic tension and contraction, with a sound design stripped of any hedonism — no longer just a metaphor for gender fluidity and mutant identity, but a language of identity affirmation. XXXXX is therefore not an accommodating record; quite the opposite, the first half is designed to carry out a strict selection at the door, moving between the irregular dubstep-trap of “Willow”, the overbearing, dark bass music of “Eidolon” (close to certain solutions explored by Rezz), and the cybernetic evolutions of “Heart”.
The album truly comes alive with “Syncope”, a deeply personal and exemplary transfiguration of flamenco, and the following “Raver”, whose musical flavor recalls the soundtracks of Carpenter. But the decisive change of pace arrives with the brief “Cinch”, which depicts Arca walking down the steps leading to the entrance of the club where she intends to spend the evening. The techno beats can be heard in the distance, muffled by the sturdy front door. It's the introduction to the footwork of “Fxck”, the true head-banging moment of the project.
A lot more happens in the second half of the album: in “Finisher”, orchestral samples are laid over fragmented rhythms; in “Futurality”, Arca offers up a prototype of post-techno for hypothetical raves of the future; in “Everything”, she shows off the IDM legacy of the Aphex Twin school; in “Grip”, she crafts a crystal-clear vision of inspired normality.
It's a dense, fragmented, deliberately difficult album, one that demands openness toward the framework the Venezuelan artist has honed over the years, to be read as a strong new declaration of artistic independence — a laboratory of experimentation that remains central to the post-club movement, even if it no longer represents its true avant-garde. Menacing synths, sampled heels (in “Taconeando”, the most perverse moment lyrically speaking), fluid, short tracks built on mutant loops: a solo, hyper-concentrated experience that leaves out any collaboration with notable names from contemporary pop.
Looking strictly at the musical side of things, references to Caribbean rhythms (dembow, reggaeton, however distorted and shattered) are completely erased: the rhythm is there not so much to dance to as to build tension, the percussion is chopped into micro-fragments and arranged to create a continuous effect of acceleration and deceleration, and the voice once again becomes a synthetic instrument, one among many, minimized, pitched to the very edge of the human, reduced to a stammer or a rhythmic hiss. Still, it's a production approach that remains “open” and three-dimensional, one suited equally well to the big festival rigs and the pop stages on which Arca will appear in the months to come.

Having explored other territories without ever setting herself overly defined boundaries, invading global pop like a true diva armed with her own avant-garde codes, with XXXXX Alejandra Ghersi turns the implosion inward, dismantling part of her own working tools in order to return to a less encyclopedic, more essential approach.
The chosen title explicitly recalls the aesthetic of some of her earlier works, &&&&& and @‎@‎@‎@‎@ (as well as the expanded version of Xen, titled “????? Edition”), as if wanting to unspool a fil rouge capable of linking together parts of her own discography — today to be read as a unified whole, the dissonant guide to a form of transgender eclecticism. Constantly teetering between vulnerability and ecstasy, XXXXX is the new chapter in an adventure unique in the musical landscape of our time — one that continues to sound as sharp as an autopsy and as searing as a harsh truth.