When Singaporean artist Yeule released their second album, 2022’s Glitch Princess, they resembled a space traveler orbiting the globe, assessing the conditions on planet Earth. With their next two albums, 2023’s Softscars and 2025’s Evangelic Girl Is a Gun, the traveler landed, then embraced a life on the blue orb, though traces of that otherworldly orientation remained. The merging of an alien persona and hyper-catchy songcraft made for rich paradoxes and a compelling gestalt.
Similarly, Sevdeliza’s 2022 EP, Raving Dahlia, captured the Dutch-Iranian artist branding herself as a “femmenoid robot”, at times eagerly, at other times reluctantly, evolving toward humanhood. The contrast between a technologized persona and a lush pop sensibility resulted in a multidimensional sound.
Finally, while Gloucestershire-born FKA Twigs doesn’t project a futuristic persona in the same way as Yeule and Sevdaliza, she makes frequent use of alien imagery, blending classic existential themes, such as longing and heartbreak, with digital/clinical sounds and a bio-dystopian sense of design and fashion.
When it comes to the confluence of pop and futurism, the artist who comes immediately to mind, however, is Venezuelan-born musician and producer Arca. While Arca‘s work primarily explores macro themes related to gender, sexuality, psycho-social integration, and spiritual transformation, integral to her music is her persona as a post-human incarnation or self-actualized cyborg. It’s worth noting, too, that in Arca’s case, accessibility is achieved not so much via conventional hooks (as with Yeule, Sevdaliza, and FKA Twigs) as via her ability to craft soundscapes that are mesmerizingly bizarre, cacophonic, exquisite, and repellent. Her work—cerebral yet evocative —is equally enthralling and Medusan.
With her last project, the five-part Kick series, she documented her diverse musical interests: industrialism, Latin beats, druggy club mixes, glitchy electronica, classical/cyber-classical palimpsests, and minimalist sketches coupled with ambient vocals. With her new album, XXXXX, Arca again strives for breadth and cohesion. If her expansive MO is reminiscent of Kick’s rangy raison d’être, however, her aesthetic and/or emotional orientation is aligned with earlier work, projects such as 2015’s Mutant, 2017’s Arca, and, particularly, the 2013 mixtape, &&&&&.
XXXXX may represent a return of sorts to a foundational style, and yet, as Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again.” To readopt is to reinvent, to revisit is to witness for the first time. Opener “No End”, for example, is familiarly clamorous, Arca glorifying the “the diva” as an archetype and a role she’s comfortable assuming. That said, the mix is meticulously rendered. Whispered voices border on the hellish, conjuring a cross between César López’s Memoria soundtrack and the witch scene in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. “Willow” includes the lurches and truncations we associate with Arca’s introductory work, but is painstakingly sculpted, each sound manipulated for a specific effect; in this case, to evoke disorientation as well as a sense of homecoming.
“Syncope”, meanwhile, features synth sounds that oscillate between the playful, angsty, and fantastical, and fast-paced percussive elements (reminiscent of Kick iii and Arca’s cohort, SOPHIE). With “Fxck”, Arca again mixes percussive elements (rhythmic and accentual) with foreboding synth sounds. “I want to fuck”, she states. The line is issued as a sexual provocation, but also as a manifesto re: the expression of Eros, individuality, and the fluid nature of identity. Additionally implicit in the statement is a critique of binarism, duality, and other forms of categorization that keep people fragmented and mired in cognitive dissonance.
“Finisher” delves into the classical, mixing Romantic string/synth phrases with clattery beats. The lush production occasionally recalls Bjork’s Vulnicura (2015) and Utopia (2017), both of which Arca co-produced (with Björk). “Futurality” nudges the classical toward the decidedly futuristic, as if the works of the great composers were being reassembled in a space settlement sometime during the 22nd century. “Grip”, on the other hand, shows Arca experimenting with edgy chamber pop, a simple melody weaving through a glitchy percussive mix.
The succinct “Throb” is Arca going fully theatrical. Armies move across the desert; angels descend. The mythical diva steps onto the stage; the air is filled with smoke and butterflies. Death and birth. Love and conflict. Destruction and enlightenment. Closure is a construct. The quest continues. Sueño serves as the project’s coda, interweaving celestial strings/synths, alarming vocal fragments, and ambient elements that range from the soothing to the agitating. The track epitomizes the way in which, throughout XXXXX, Arca balances her penchant for excess with a commitment to restraint.
One imagines that if Arca fleshed out her persona’s bio, the backstory would involve high-tech prosthetics being acquired from different sides of the galaxy and assembled at some interstellar laboratory. In the movie, Arca: Rise of the Posthuman, directed by Julia Ducournau, the moment of transcendence, the unification of machinery and awareness, would be portrayed as Blakean, the ultimate juncture of mad science and cosmic spirituality. Fast forward: the cyborg, the biomechanoid, is now more human than a human.