Consider Arca a cyborg, a performance artist more so than a producer. For the Venezuelan visionary, the sonic and somatic are inseparable, her music an extension of her physical form, a document of becoming — each project another transmutation from one body into the next. Her records feel like autopsies of past bodies, dissected in the present to build for the future. The body horrors of earlier work mutated the masculine into something grotesque yet gorgeously delicate.
But these mutations were never conclusive. They were parts of the unstable, often violent process of becoming, each disfigurement bringing the artist closer to the body she was moving towards. The five-album ‘KiCK’ cycle remains the most brutal of these dissections, the point where Arca’s knife cut beyond skin and bone into the soul itself. If ‘KiCK’ documented the final demolition, perhaps ‘XXXXX’ presents what survived the reconstruction.
Like her earlier mixtapes, ‘XXXXX’ unfolds as a continuous composition. And though her recent work remixing Robyn and producing for Madonna hinted at a more impassioned move toward pop, Arca the pop star is strangely absent, appearing less as a vocalist and more like a dissonant guide, stitching together the album’s mostly experimental, void-like spaces through whispered narration and the recurring invocation of the word ‘diva’. Introduced in ecstatic stutters on album opener ‘No End’ before returning in increasingly distorted forms, ‘diva’ becomes less a lyric than an incantation, summoning the body the album is assembling.
This is not to say that Arca has reconfigured herself beyond recognition. ‘Taconeando’ bares fragments of ‘KiCK iii’s blistering reggaeton, while ‘Fxck’ is unequivocally an Arca pop song. And even if things feel more streamlined in structure, there is still chaos here. ‘XXXXX’ is a dark, dank piece of work, full of rumbling, submerged bass and vestigial snatches of distortion. The record suspends snatches of internet era alt-hip-hop and underground bass music in a vacuum, recalling her earliest experiments. ‘Raver’ places a syncopated arpeggio in space, an exercise in restraint despite its evocative title. At its heaviest, tracks like the twisted ghetto-tech of ‘Willow’ flirt with answering the question nobody asked: what if Arca made a Death Grips record?
It’s the structure to the chaos that’s new for Arca.
The hip-hop, trap and grime threaded throughout ‘XXXXX’ don’t signal a retreat to familiar territory so much as a return to the bones that have always lain beneath Arca’s work. This is, afterall, one of the minds behind Kanye’s era-defining ‘Yeezus’. Earlier records may have smashed these genres apart — not to reject them but rather understand them from the inside out — but here she reinforces them. It’s perhaps the most radical thing she can do, settle into something close to conventional — if only to begin the whole cycle of transmutation afresh.
‘Fxck’, then, feels less like a concession to convention than another stage in that process of becoming. Arca has always made her body the work, each record another iteration. ‘XXXXX’, though the closest to some kind of completion, doesn’t mark the resolution of this process. This is her body for now. One that has taken endless work to build, and finally stable enough for her to start again.
