By Azzam Bilal 
HangupsMusic.com – To understand the artistry of Arca is to look beyond the traditional boundaries of music production and enter the realm of the biological. The Venezuelan visionary has long positioned herself as a synthetic organism—a performance artist whose medium is as much her own physical form as it is the digital frequencies she manipulates. For Arca, the distinction between the somatic and the sonic is nonexistent. Her discography serves as a living, breathing document of an ongoing metamorphosis, where each new project represents a transmutation from one state of being into another. If her previous works were the clinical autopsies of her past selves, performed in the public eye to clear the path for a new identity, her latest endeavor represents the first stable breath of a body finally made whole.
The trajectory of Arca’s career has been defined by a restless, often violent process of becoming. In her earlier years, the music was a site of body horror, where masculine tropes were distorted and mutated into grotesque, yet strangely delicate, sculptures of sound. These were not merely aesthetic choices; they were the necessary disfigurements required to move closer to the self she was destined to inhabit. This period of radical flux reached its peak with the monumental KiCK cycle—a five-album odyssey that functioned as a total demolition of the artist’s previous framework. Through those records, Arca’s creative blade cut deep, moving past the superficial layers of skin and bone to probe the very essence of the soul. It was a brutal, exhaustive exercise in self-reconstruction. If the KiCK series was the sound of the old world falling away, then her newest work, currently circulating under the enigmatic title XXXXX, is the sound of what remains once the dust has settled.
Structurally, XXXXX returns to the format that first garnered Arca underground acclaim: the continuous, gapless composition. Much like her seminal mixtapes, this project refuses to be partitioned into neat, radio-ready segments. Instead, it unfolds as a singular, immersive environment. This choice is particularly striking given Arca’s recent flirtations with the heights of global pop. Having recently lent her touch to remixes for Robyn and contributed to the production of Madonna’s latest ventures, there was a widespread expectation that she might fully embrace the role of the avant-pop star. However, in XXXXX, that persona is conspicuously absent. She does not appear as a conventional vocalist or a front-facing icon; rather, she haunts the periphery of the record like a dissonant guide. She navigates the listener through vast, experimental voids, using whispered narration and the ritualistic repetition of a single word: “diva.”
This word, “diva,” serves as the album’s primary anchor. It is first introduced through the ecstatic, glitch-heavy stutters of the opening track “No End,” and it resurfaces throughout the duration of the record in increasingly warped and unrecognizable forms. In Arca’s hands, the term is stripped of its celebrity connotations and transformed into an incantation—a linguistic tool used to summon the very body that the music is attempting to assemble. It is a haunting, recurring motif that suggests the “diva” is not a person, but a state of being or a cybernetic goal toward which the artist is constantly striving.
Despite this heavy emphasis on the abstract and the experimental, XXXXX does not represent a total departure from the sounds that have defined Arca’s journey. There are echoes of her past scattered throughout the wreckage. The track “Taconeando,” for instance, carries the DNA of the blistering, hyper-kinetic reggaeton found on KiCK iii, though it is presented here in a more fragmented, ghostly state. Meanwhile, “Fxck” stands out as a rare moment of clarity—a piece that is unequivocally an Arca pop song, albeit one filtered through a lens of digital decay. Even as the album adopts a more streamlined and cohesive structure than the chaotic outbursts of her mid-career work, a sense of underlying turbulence remains. The record is a dark, humid experience, defined by subterranean bass frequencies and vestigial remnants of distortion that cling to the melodies like moss.
In many ways, XXXXX feels like a vacuum into which the history of internet-era subcultures has been sucked and suspended. There are traces of alternative hip-hop and underground bass music that recall Arca’s earliest sonic experiments, yet they are recontextualized within this new, sterile environment. On the track “Raver,” she employs a syncopated arpeggio that floats in a vast, empty space. Despite the high-energy implications of the title, the song is a masterclass in restraint, stripping away the euphoria of the dancefloor to reveal the skeletal mechanics beneath. At the other end of the spectrum lies “Willow,” a piece of twisted ghetto-tech that pushes the record to its most aggressive limits. It is a track that seems to answer a question that few had the audacity to ask: what would happen if Arca’s fluid, metamorphic soundscapes were forced into the jagged, abrasive mold of a Death Grips record?
The most significant shift in Arca’s approach on this project is the introduction of a new kind of order. There has always been chaos in her music, but here, that chaos is given a rigid architecture. The threads of hip-hop, trap, and grime that are woven throughout XXXXX do not represent a retreat into familiar or “safe” territory. Instead, they signify a return to the foundational elements that have always existed beneath the surface of her work. It is easy to forget that Arca was one of the primary architects behind the sound of Kanye West’s Yeezus, an album that redefined the boundaries of industrial hip-hop. While her earlier solo records often sought to smash these genres into unrecognizable pieces—an act of deconstruction intended to understand their internal logic—on XXXXX, she chooses to reinforce them.
This decision to settle into something resembling conventional genre structures is, in itself, perhaps the most radical move Arca could make. For an artist whose entire career has been built on the rejection of the static and the celebration of the fluid, adopting a sense of stability is a bold subversion of expectations. It suggests that the process of transmutation has reached a temporary plateau. The “Fxck” track, while accessible, is not a concession to the mainstream; it is a demonstration of a body that is finally strong enough to support its own weight. Arca has always used her physical and digital presence as the primary site of her work, with each album serving as a new iteration of her being.
As the record draws to a close, it becomes clear that XXXXX is not a final destination, but a necessary state of equilibrium. It is the sound of a survivor who has moved through the fire of the KiCK cycle and emerged with a reconstructed sense of self. The body she has built through these compositions is one that required years of labor, pain, and public dissection to realize. It is a form that is finally stable enough to exist in the world without the immediate need for further mutilation. However, in the world of Arca, stability is never the end of the story. It is merely the foundation upon which the next cycle of transformation will begin. This is her body for the present moment—a complex, shimmering intersection of the human and the machine, standing ready for the next stage of its evolution.
