Review Summary: Arca’s past selves coexist in her most fully realized vision yet
Arca is one of those artists who doesn’t just create worlds—she gets completely absorbed in them. That key quality is why her albums are singular and beautiful, yet frustratingly amorphous, packed with plenty of interesting ideas that don’t blossom into great ones. The beginning of the decade finds Arca trying to remedy this issue; her
Kick series (spawning five albums) embraced more pop sensibilities and various influences ranging from reggaeton and noisy deconstructed club to witch house and ambient music. But once the novelty of hearing Arca pitch-shift her voice in those new soundscapes wears off, the series’ replay value suffers greatly. Then she pivots once more. If this new record proves anything, it’s another defining trait of her music: she never does this quite the same way twice.
XXXXX is Arca’s ninth studio album and a perfect synthesis of everything that came before it. This record wouldn’t exist without her previous releases, no matter how well they executed their visions; whether you’re someone like me who mostly enjoys her earlier work (2014’s
Xen or 2017’s self-titled) or someone who got a lot out of the aforementioned
Kick series, Arca’s latest will be another beautiful world to get absorbed in–maybe her strongest one, even.
For proof of that, look no further than the album's centerpiece: ‘Fxck’ is a sexually charged club-banger that just would never have been conceived without her 2020s foray into straightforward structures—and she still tangles it up with her glitchy vocals and outré sounds that recall her first couple of EPs and albums. It’s one of her catchiest songs to date and the point where
XXXXX truly comes into sharp focus. No knock on the preceding tracks, especially the one-two punch of ‘Willow’’s eerie bells and synthesizers and ‘Eidolon’’s irresistible hook past its one-minute mark. But those first seven tracks often relapse into Arca’s old problem: fascinating sound collages that plod rather than cohere. ‘Heart’’s start-stop feel to its rising synths and ‘Syncope’’s prolonged stutters are perfect examples of this and hurt the early momentum of the record. But then ‘Fxck’ arrives and what a change that brings: there's an enticing second half here and the strongest set of songs Arca has put her name to. ‘Finisher’ recalls
Xen with its combination of classical instrumentation, skittering kick drums and trap snares that feels more grandiose and refined now than it did then. The back-to-back jittery IDM of ‘Futurality’ and ‘Grip’ is a sugar rush—an experimental version of, say, Autechre’s 90s IDM and ambient techno. Once ‘Enraptured’ comes up,
XXXXX is less abrasive and veers toward ethereal and ambient soundscapes for its closing run, and what a run that is. Arca has already made worlds of similar genres, but they’ve never sounded as fully realized and pretty as they do on the Aphex Twin-inspired ‘Everything’ or closer ‘Sueno’, where Arca’s almost-screaming vocals pierce through the resonant landscape. Where’s the connecting tissue in all this?
As another ode to embracing her past, Arca has made yet another mixtape. Like 2013’s
&&&&& and 2020’s
@@@@@ mixtapes, Arca’s latest seamlessly flows from one track to the next as if it’s a 47-minute track. But unlike those previous releases, which are sonically adventurous but don’t warrant multiple revisits or contain any standouts,
XXXXX has plenty of replay value and the fact that it’s meant as a continuous listening experience doesn’t take away from its piecemeal consumption; there are highlights aplenty here. There’s a more industrial influence on this album than ever before which makes its usual experimental electronic and IDM compositions sound more haunting and mechanical. That’s no coincidence: Arca has always been intrigued by the concepts of identity, sexuality, transformation and posthuman augmentation: what does it mean to be human—contradictions and all—embracing the machine and raging against it? This album is the closest she’s come to answering this, with a symbiotic combination of industrial-influenced IDM and pitch-shifted human emotions: love, sexual desire, self-assurance. It's right there in the album's artwork: Arca, as a biomechanical entity, accompanied by two owls, symbols of the underworld and protection in Greek mythology. The imagery reflects the music in
XXXXX: it sounds both terrifying and mechanical but also raw and liberatory. Another bizarre and entrancing world to get lost in.
