Arca's XXXXX rebuilds structure from the wreckage of her KiCK cycle
The Venezuelan artist's new album abandons the deconstructive violence of her five-record KiCK series for something closer to conventional form, signalling a new phase in one of experimental music's most restless projects.
Arca has released XXXXX, a new full-length that arrives as the most structurally coherent work of her career. Where the Venezuelan artist's five-album KiCK cycle dismantled genre and form with escalating intensity, this record reassembles the pieces into something that, by her standards, approaches convention.
The album unfolds as a single continuous composition, a format Arca last used on her earlier mixtapes. Tracks bleed into one another through whispered narration and the repeated invocation of the word "diva", first introduced in stutters on opener "No End" and then distorted into a kind of incantation across the record's runtime.
Sonic references to her past remain. "Taconeando" carries fragments of the blistering reggaeton that defined KiCK iii, while "Fxck" functions as a straightforward pop song. But the dominant palette is darker: submerged bass, vestigial distortion, and a vacuum-like treatment of internet-era alt-hip-hop and underground bass music that recalls her earliest experiments.
The structural shift is the story. Hip-hop, trap and grime run through XXXXX not as material to be torn apart but as scaffolding to be reinforced. This is, after all, one of the architects behind Kanye West's Yeezus. Earlier records dissected these genres from the inside; here, Arca settles into them.
That move follows hints of a popward turn in her recent outside work, including a remix for Robyn and production for Madonna. Yet the pop-star version of Arca is largely absent from XXXXX. She appears less as a vocalist than as a guide threading through the album's void-like spaces.
At its heaviest, the record flirts with industrial aggression. "Willow" pushes a twisted ghetto-tech rhythm into territory that evokes Death Grips, while "Raver" strips a syncopated arpeggio down to near-silence despite its title's promise of release.
For European club and experimental music audiences, the significance lies in what the consolidation implies. Arca has spent years treating each release as a demolition, and XXXXX reads as the first structure built on the cleared site. It is, by the artist's own iterative logic, a body stable enough to begin the next cycle of transmutation.
The album does not resolve Arca's long-running project of self-reconstruction. But it marks the point where that project has, for now, stopped cutting and started building.
