ARCA - XXXXX

It feels like we've been talking for ages about Arca as one of the planet's most innovative and transgressive producers, and yet her debut album - still an underground affair - dates back a mere thirteen years. Since then she's moved in multiple directions, between fashion shows, installations, performance art, avant-garde painting exhibitions (most recently at London's ICA) and - of course - plenty of music, with performances and DJ sets everywhere, alongside a jungle of top-tier collaborations with pop superstars, from Kanye West to Bjork, from Addison Rae to Madonna, for whom she recently helped produce two tracks on "Confessions II". And yet with every new work released under her own name, Alejandra Ghersi Rodriguez wipes the slate clean of any pop or celebrity drift, retreating instead into an almost ruthless intransigence, that brand of stubborn experimentalism through which she has, album after album, sharpened a clear positioning of her own image.

The new "XXXXX" shows no mercy either: far from feeling like a product packaged by an icon fully absorbed into the circuits of luxury and musical mainstream, it plays like the work of a researcher intent on continuing her meticulous dissection of the pop song as material. There's no chasing consensus here, only the firm intention to leave a meaningful mark, to rise up as a source of inspiration for generations to come. In fact, five years on from the sprawling, five-part "Kick" (which included an attempt to soften her approach somewhat, even yielding a couple of alternative-scene hits with the "Prada"/"Rakata" pairing), Arca reclaims her own language in even more radical fashion, through a demanding record built on constant rhythmic tension and contraction, its sound design stripped of any hedonism - no longer simply a metaphor for gender fluidity and mutant identity, but a language of identity affirmation in its own right.

"XXXXX" is therefore anything but an accommodating record - if anything, its first half seems designed to rigorously vet listeners at the door, moving through the jagged Dubstep-trap of "Willow", the overbearing, dark bass music of "Eidolon" (not far from certain moves by Rezz), and the cybernetic evolutions of "Heart".
The album truly gets going with "Syncope", a deeply personal transfiguration of flamenco, and the following "Raver", whose musical flavour isn't too far removed from the soundtracks of John Carpenter. But the decisive shift comes with the brief "Cinch", which pictures Arca making her way down the steps leading into the club where she plans to spend the night. Techno beats can be heard in the distance, muffled by the heavy front door. It's the intro to the footwork of "Fxck", the record's real head-banger.

Plenty more happens in the album's second half: on "Finisher", orchestral samples are laid over choppy rhythms; on "Futurality", Arca sketches out a prototype of post-techno for hypothetical raves of the future; on "Everything", she shows off her IDM inheritance from the Aphex Twin school; on "Grip", she crafts a crystal-clear vision of inspired normality.
It's a dense, fragmented, deliberately difficult album, one that demands an openness to the framework the Venezuelan artist has honed over the years - to be read as a new, forceful declaration of artistic independence, a laboratory of experimentation that remains a linchpin of the post-club movement, even if it no longer represents its true cutting edge. Menacing synths, sampled heel-clicks (on "Taconeando", the most perverse moment lyrically), fluid, brief tracks built on mutating loops - a solo, hyper-focused experience that leaves no room for any collaboration with major names from contemporary pop.

Looking purely at the musical side of things, all traces of Caribbean rhythms (dembow, reggaeton, however distorted and shattered) have been wiped out - rhythms that on "Kick" were meant to narrate young Ghersi's adolescence. Rhythm here serves to build tension rather than to make you dance; percussion is chopped into micro-fragments and arranged to create a continuous effect of acceleration and deceleration, while the voice once again becomes a synthetic instrument, just one among others, minimized, pitched to the very limits of the human, reduced to stammering or a rhythmic hiss. Still, it's a production approach that remains "open" and three-dimensional, one that proves equally suited to big festival sound systems and pop stages alike - stages on which Arca will surely appear in the coming months (she'll be back at Turin's C2C at the end of October).

After exploring other territories, never setting itself overly defined boundaries, invading global pop like a true diva with its own avant-garde codes, “XXXXX” represents an inward implosion, the moment in which Alejandra Ghersi dismantles part of her own working tools to return to a less encyclopedic, more essential approach. The chosen title explicitly recalls the aesthetic of earlier Arca works, “&&&&&” (2013) and “@‎@‎@‎@‎@” (2020) (as well as the expanded version of “Xen”, titled “????? Edition”, from 2015), as if to unroll a fil rouge capable of linking parts of her discography together, a dissonant guide for a form of transgender eclecticism. Constantly balanced between vulnerability and ecstasy, “XXXXX” is the new chapter of an adventure that sounds as sharp as an autopsy, as lacerating as a dramatic truth.

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11/08/2026