Arca has announced her new album ‘XXXXX’ alongside an ambitious Daniel Sannwald-directed livestream.
The Venezuelan experimental producer will release her eighth studio album on July 31 via XL Recordings – her first new music since her expansive ‘Kick’ pentalogy ended in 2021.
‘XXXXX’ is said to be “a body of work that is darker, more aggressive, more experimental, and unwilling to settle into fixed form.”
“Suspended between posthuman augmentation and raw emotion, ‘XXXXX’ exposes the mainframe,” a press release for the album reads. “It is a record born from uncertainty, contradiction, instinct, and surrender—a becoming-machine that continues Arca’s lifelong project of redefining what it means to be human both in, and against, the machine”.
Alongside her new album, Arca will also premiere a one-of-a-kid livestream on July 23. Directed by Daniel Sannwald (Rosalía, SZA, Rihanna), the livestream will commence at 9:30 PM CEST here and “blurs the boundaries between IRL, streaming, durational performance, and hallucination”.
Take a look at the album’s tracklisting below and pre-save the album here.
Arca’s ‘XXXXX’ tracklisting is:
‘Willow’
‘Eidolon’
‘Heart’
‘Syncope’
‘Raver’
‘Clinch’
‘Fxck’
‘Finisher’
‘Grip’
‘Enraptured’
‘Throb’
‘Everything’
‘Sueño’
We reviewed the first of her ‘Kick’ albums in 2020, where we gave it four stars.
“Considering the range of genres incorporated in the album, it’s stunning that it never veers fully towards only one,” we said of the record. “Instead, ‘KiCk i’ incorporates pop, experimental, noise, electronica and psychedelia into one project. Amid a highly acclaimed career, Arca’s latest album presents a new high-water mark.”
Most recently, Arca appeared in Madonna’s ‘Confessions II’ film, where she appeared alongside famous faces like Julia Garner, Shygirl, Gwendoline Christie, Richard E. Grant, Honey Dijon, Odessa A’zion, Madonna’s daughter Lourdes Leon and Chelsea players Cole Palmer and Joao Pedro.
Elsewhere, Björk is set to host a solar eclipse day rave on August 12 in Iceland, with performances from Arca, Sideproject and Ronja Jóhannsdóttir. Visit here for tickets.
