Between production work and collaborations with artists like Robyn, Addison Rae, or, more recently, Madonna’s new album, and its much-talked-about collaboration with Safety Trance on ‘El alma que te trajo’, Arca had not released a studio album in five years. With ‘XXXXX’ she hits two birds with one stone: she releases new material and rises to the challenge of following her celebrated pentalogy from 2020-2021 with a record equal to it.
Arca conceived ‘XXXXX’ as a continuation of her mixtapes ‘@@@@@’ (2020) and ‘&&&&&’ (2013), but at some point during the process she decided to turn it into a studio album. The decision speaks to the strength of the artistic proposal, while also revealing its origin: the songs progress in unpredictable, elusive ways, without following an obvious structure.
‘XXXXX’ marks the return of Arca’s most experimental side, as its giger-inspired cover already suggests, drawing from the biomechanical aesthetic popularized by H. R. Giger and made iconic by the ‘Alien’ films. It is also experimental because the development of the songs seems to respond more to intuition than to conventional logic, even though the production is filled with meticulous details and is extraordinarily well-crafted from start to finish.
Here there is no deconstructed reggaeton, but an abundance of sounds and abstract developments that keep the album from losing interest almost all the time. The silences and the bong percussion in ‘Willow’ intrigue before becoming a kind of alien industrial trap; ‘Syncope’ is a sped-up IDM glitch that gives Aphex Twin a wry nod, and there are moments that recall other artists—‘Heart’ and ‘Everything’ are two beautiful glitch-inspired tracks—as well as Arca herself in her early days. There you can hear the metallic pulse of ‘Futurality’, the melted techno of ‘Raver’, or the catharsis of ‘Sueño’, which connects directly with her early releases.
Risking that this ends up being mere name-dropping of supposed influences, the charm of the album lies not in the references but in how it builds an immersive universe from that biomechanical inspiration. The entire record is threaded by a dark and threatening energy, on which, paradoxically, Arca’s voice ends up feeling comforting. ‘XXXXX’ aims to emulate the broadcast of an imaginary “Experimental Diva FM” and, although some sonic landscapes can feel as oppressive as those in ‘Eidolon’, the overall sensation is that of entering a deeply introspective, welcoming, and warm world.
Not every composition turns out to be so accessible. Tracks like ‘Cinch’, ‘Grip’ or ‘Enraptured’ display such intuitive experimentation that, at times, the album seems not to have a wholly clear direction and some passages become particularly dense and intractable. Precisely for that reason, the album’s antibangers, such as the hypnotic ‘Taconeando’ or ‘Fxck’, work so well: they provide footholds within a journey that never fully settles.
That sense of comfort is explicitly expressed in the fusion of beats and strings on ‘Finisher’, where Arca recalls that “you were never alone” and that the love we need lies within us, before inviting us to unleash our inner fierceness. ‘XXXXX’ isn’t a record for dancing, but one that speaks directly to the mind. The album dives into the more abstract, posthuman, and restless facet of Arca. It is the artist you remember, evolved.
