Hi, everyone. Futhany Turetano here, the internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of this new Arca album [XXXXX].

Yes, here we have a brand new record whose title consists of five X's from producer, DJ, electronic, experimental, music phenom, a true, multi-hyphenate Arca, who is now technically on her ninth full-length album here, though some of these records came out in a kind of unorthodox fashion. And I also want to remind you guys that over the years Arca has put out mixtape stuff and EP releases and works that span back before her debut record.

In fact, my introduction to her stuff was her original Stretch EPs 1 and 2 from 2012. In fact, I still have my original Stretch 2 promo right here. These projects gained a moderate amount of buzz on the internet at the time that they dropped due to their mind-based ending, envelope pushing, glitch-hop, and deconstructed club production that was bold and unique for sure, and showed a lot of potential, though I will say it felt like what Arca was doing around this point was still kind of in an incubation stage of some sort.

However, over the next few years Arca would go on to make some massive music industry moves that even her biggest and earliest supporters I don't think could have predicted. Collaborating extensively with artists like Björk as well as Kanye West to help them develop some of the most vital sounds of their careers in the 2010s.

So early on, Arca was already proving herself to be an exciting asset to established artists who were looking to shake up their sound in some way. But she refused to just stay in a supporting role going forward. As she started to increase her solo output with a debut full-length record. With a few follow-ups as well that would also help her develop her style and voice as a producer and a composer-songwriter. Now, personally, these initial releases certainly had their moments, but to me a lot of them feel like these very difficult to decipher collages and experimental motifs in retrospect.

Though, I will say these records did succeed in drumming up a lot of excitement among experimental electronic enthusiasts who saw records like Xen and Mutant as spiritual successors to IDM classics from artists like Autechre as well as Aphex Twin.

In my view, though, I don't think Arca would really come into her own until she really launched the Kick series in 2020. The first installment of which featured more prominent lead vocals, more formal song structures, art, and Latin pop blends that also featured a lot of club and hip-hop-centric grooves.

This record over here was the most accessible Arca had sounded in her career so far, and it certainly paid off with a growing audience and more critical acclaim than she had ever had before. But again, the issue with Kick or just simply dropping this first one is that it was intended to be a part of an ongoing series., and we wouldn't get the second installment of that until the tail end of the following year, 2021.

And I suppose Arca didn't want to leave fans waiting any longer, and it would be really a matter of weeks until we would hear the rest of the Kick series, as Kick 3, 4, and 5 all dropped the same month in December of 2021, too. And I broke down each one of these projects individually in each video I did, because every single one of them had a distinct sound and direction, with Kicks 4 and 5 being the most ambient-leaning of these five records.

And Kick 3, which in my opinion is the best one, has really become a fan favorite over the years, and is one of the most chaotic, fun, and visceral electronic music albums of the 2020s so far, probably will remain to be as we close the decade out.

And now, we're at a point where it's five years later, and while Arca has remained very active when it's come to music and performance, streaming, and social media, she's definitely been taking her time when it's come to developing and shaping whatever this next full-length album is going to be. But again, given that her last cycle involved finishing and releasing five whole full-length albums, I think most fans have just been content to let her do that at whatever pace it's going to happen.

I think the time in between this new album and the Kick series has only been a good thing, though. Especially considering the change in tone and sound on this LP feels less like a continuation of "everything" Arca has been doing, and more like a reset. A reminder of where her creative roots ultimately lie. Because while it may have been more club-centric and pop-friendly sounds that helped put her on the map, a lot of her initial influences are far more left-field than that.

The opening moments of this album, though, also point toward, I guess you would say, the conceptual spirit of this record. With the skittering echo drops calling out, "Diva! Experimental FM! Experimental Diva! Diva! Diva Diva! Experimental!" Peppered throughout this record at certain points, we're hearing some kind of DJ drop, a radio announcement. Which obviously leads me to wonder if this record is being formatted like some kind of avant-garde, queer, experimental, electronic dance experience, transitioning from piece to piece with a kind of loose flow and order. Potential radio inspiration aside, though, this record does feel like Arca is going back to something that is a lot more akin to her earliest full lengths.

Except this time, the production and sound design and structuring chops are all improved with age and experience, so going as out there as possible on a record like this feels a lot more fulfilling and legitimately adventurous. And I guess you could say more evocative, too. Stylistically, we hit some pretty familiar genre tags for Arca on this record, be it either deconstructed club, IDM, UK Bass, glitch. Which, again, leads me to say that I feel like you could really think of this record as Arca forging new territory, but in familiar fields. Or creatively going back to your old stomping grounds, just to see kind of how far you've come.

But also, by that same token, I feel like the sonic net on this album is cast in such a wide fashion that there's very little consistency and focus right off the bat. For example, the two starting tracks, "No End" and "Willow," do a good enough job of setting a kind of mysterious and explorative tone for the record. In fact, the latter of the two kind of makes me feel like I'm being sucked up slow motion into a tractor beam and being operated on while held captive on a glitch-hop spaceship.

And then the following track, "Eidolon," while it does have a promising start with these super tense kick patterns and head-nodding groove switch-ups, all the distant synthesizers and murky vocals. Don't really do much to keep things interesting. In order to progress the track, why not layer up or make all of these elements a bit louder or bolder or clearer, so that we can get a full sense of the idea.

The song "Heart" then provides another pretty radical compositional change of pace, with the bulk of its runtime being taken up by these twisted, shimmering, stuttering melody lines that progressively undergo a series of strange mutations, kind of changing a little bit each time it plays and repeats. It's a cool idea, but I wish it had more supporting layers to kind of keep it interesting. Then "Syncope" is a kind of harrowing ass shaker, honestly, with persistent claps, booming bass, an off-kilter synth riff that dares you to get into a dance competition with ancient intergalactic beings with six legs for stepping and three asses for shaking.

As we enter the midpoint of the record, the shake-ups continue, but some of the tight segues from one song to the next do too. The song "Fxck" is maybe the most rave-friendly highlight on the entire project, has some of the heaviest bass, heaviest drums, and maybe the most impenetrable industrial atmosphere of the entire album.

Immediately from here, we move into the beautifully strange and whimsical string sections that are all over "Finisher," whose drums do feel a little at odds with the string licks, but there's some meat on the bone with this track, for sure.

Then, right after this, we get these tuned, dizzying Spanish rap verses on "Taconeando," and the vibes coming off this production are absolutely frightening, especially, these, I don't know if you would want to call them snares or claps, either way, they sound like snapping bones, but damn if they don't got a groove to them.

As we near the end of this record, I feel like Arca kind of alternates between pieces that are very kind of fleeting in nature and super abstract with various disconnected sounds that just happen to be operating all at once. And then other tracks that feel maybe a bit more developed and cohesive, be it either "Grip," which has some pretty repetitive and persistent percussion sections and really kind of feels like an Autechre number through and through. There's also "Throb," which features some really dystopian chord sections and rumbling bass.

And then "Everything," which is a track that I don't think will be for everyone, but at least for me, it scratches a very interesting and unique itch in that you have these consistent rhythms and what sounds like vocal bits and chord changes, but they're all being sort of fed through and interrupted by these stuttering, fluttering, fluctuations in volume, which have a very rhythmic quality to them. It's kind of like listening to an abstract electronic piece through radio static or weird fluctuations of air. It's got a very odd sonic quality to it and I'm absolutely mesmerized by it. Entranced by it, really. An effect that I wish more songs on this record had on me.

The closing "Sueño" is a really intense number, with its distant, shrieked, screamed, autotune lead vocals and dystopian electronics kind of droning away along with them. But again, as powerful as the peak of this particular track is, I do feel like it exemplifies an overall issue that I have with this album.

That yes, there are highlights and bold and memorable moments that are strewn about this record for sure, but even the highest highs of this project, due to a lack of structure and follow-through, do still come across at least a little bit fleeting.

So while I do think this album is much more adventurous than a lot of Arca's early work, due to her abilities and production chops having increased and improved over the years, there still is kind of an issue with sticking the landing on a lot of these tracks. But maybe that's just kind of the, the double-edged sword nature of this album. The lack of cohesion and lack of focus that I'm kind of noting here is leading to a lot of songs that just kind of finish out of nowhere or don't really progress all that far.

But simultaneously, it's that lack of boundaries and that lack of planning and rules that this record has at its core that's allowing Arca to experiment so wildly and bring so many different flavors and tones and vibes to the table to begin with. And if that's really a selling point for you on this record and drawing you into it, then maybe that's just enough. At least, for me, it's enough. Enough to at least like the album. I can say that. Which is why I'm feeling about a decent to strong 7 on it.

Anthony Fantano. Arca. Forever.