Review of ‘XXXXX’, Arca’s new work
Five years later, the darker, experimental and to some extent challenging version of Ark. Nothing to do – or very little – with the five installments of the “Kick” series, released between 2020 and 2021, which had been their last works so far. I don’t think we’re facing the most brilliant album in Alejandra Ghersi’s career either, but we are facing one that can remind us why Björk, Madonna, FKA twigs or Lady Gaga were raffling off her services a few seasons ago.
Because “XXXXX” (2026) is an album of contrasts between soundscapes, the kind where you know more or less how they begin, but hardly how they evolve and even less how they conclude. The feeling of unpredictability prevails. Some of their cuts are a bit impenetrable, far from any remote idea of mainstream, but they all convey a certain idea of wanting to go further, of continuing to investigate the possibilities of electronic music at this point in its course, if all this makes any sense. And in session mode, with their compositions linked without a break in continuity, although any idea of dance here is more than debatable.
Whether from the deconstruction of club music (“Eidolon”), from the recovery of tectonic rhythms of seismic power (“Syncope”), from the reformulation of the broken beats and the rave culture that reigned in the nineties (“Fxck”), since the rewriting of the Warp Seal teachings (“Finisher”), from a maximalism that saturates the expressiveness of hyperpop (“Dream”) or from a certain idea of minimalism (“Cinch”, “Everything”) or futurism (“Futurality”) sui generis. At first, it is logical to debate whether it really generates as much addiction as just a genuine interest in unraveling it, something that already depends on the number of listens one pays to it. In any case, there are sixteen cuts that look at the horizon, and not at the rearview mirror.
