XXXXX: Arca’s Raw and Restless Return After Five Years

Arca, the Venezuelan musician and producer born Alejandra Ghersi Rodriguez in Caracas in 1989, is back after five years with XXXXX, a sixteen-track, forty-seven-minute album released by XL Recordings. It was first meant to be a mixtape, but she changed her mind and let it become an album without sanding off what made it a mixtape. She has called the decision mischievous, a way of interrupting the autopilot that five years of silence tends to build around a release. The title follows the tradition of her earlier mixtapes, each named with five repeated characters. XXXXX is her first album since the KICK pentalogy, a series released across eighteen months whose last four instalments arrived on consecutive days and which closed in December 2021. These five years are the longest gap between records in her career, but they were hardly quiet: she stood onstage with Beyonce on the Renaissance tour, played Coachella twice, co-produced two tracks on Madonna's Confessions II, cut a record with Tokischa, remixed Robyn, Hikaru Utada and Addison Rae, scored a film, and hung her first institutional exhibition at the ICA in London. Rather than continue the pop-leaning direction of KICK, the new record returns to the darker, more abrasive sound of her early work, Xen and Mutant. The tracks move between club music, noise, trance, IDM and heavily processed sound. The opener, No End, works like a title sequence: ninety seconds of distorted, chopped vocals and ambience before anything resembling a song arrives. The shorter pieces, which the press materials call experimental diva FM idents, are less songs than stations you pass through. That mixtape logic is why the album can travel from the sweet to the harrowing within minutes without seeming to lurch. The centrepiece, Fxck, is a club track built to move a room, and its chorus is a repeated demand to kill the father. Arca has ruled out any literal reading: the father is an interiorised figure, the version of patriarchy each person carries, a system she describes as caging men as thoroughly as it constrains anyone else. Killing it, in her framing, clears space for the mother archetype and for whatever mythology gets built next. She performed the song last week during a two-hour livestream from an abandoned factory in Barcelona, covered in red paint, spray-painting a canvas on the floor. The closer, Sueno, Spanish for dream, is in the critic's view the best and most exposed thing on the record. It is built around a scream, and Arca has spoken about screaming in almost anatomical terms: the heavy armour it takes to force that much pressure through the fragile membrane of the vocal folds. Where everything else on the album is mediated, processed, pitched, glitched and run through the machine, the last thing you hear is the least mediated sound a body can make. The voice works as a prosthesis throughout the record, a tool for unsettling fixed ideas about gender and sound; on Sueno it stops being a tool and becomes the body itself. Mary Chiney, reviewing for The Quietus, finds that the album does not always hold its contradictions together, that some of its middle stretch passes before it registers, and that a listener who came to Arca through the avant-pop of KICK will find far less to hold onto here. But the unruliness is deliberate. Arca has said the record came out of losing control, of collaborating with her unconscious so that inertia would not decide where the music went. Five years of silence could have produced a careful statement; this is the opposite, and it is the more interesting choice. Listen: "Sueno", the album's closing track, from the Barcelona livestream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7eYB6AroLg

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