Arca Details ‘XXXXX’, an Album Against the Machine

Almost five years after closing her ‘Kick’ pentalogy, Arca has completed a new album. ‘XXXXX’ follows a stretch of exhaustion—the final four installments of that series were released across four consecutive days at the end of 2021—and a deliberate retreat into other practices. She walked a Proenza Schouler runway, mounted a performance installation in Paris, and opened a solo exhibition of paintings in London earlier this year. In an interview with The Guardian, she described painting as “a way of processing violences” and a path back to music.

The record picks up the thread of ‘@@@@@’, the 62-minute single from 2020 that introduced Diva Experimental FM: a speculative pirate-radio broadcast from a world where analogue signals offer the only escape from post-singularity AI surveillance. ‘XXXXX’ stays inside that logic. Arca’s press release frames it as a continuation of her “lifelong project of redefining what it means to be human both in, and against, the machine.” She names losing control and collaborating with the unconscious as the process.

That tension is immediate. On opener “No End,” the first words are a whispered, cavernous line: “the shadows, they speaketh.” A spoken-word passage later arrives on “Cinch,” reinforcing the album’s dense, clanging architecture. Where the ‘Kick’ records pushed toward accessibility—Grammy-nominated territory, samples on Madonna and Lady Gaga tracks, a cameo during Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour—‘XXXXX’ pulls back toward the tangled, expressive rawness of Arca’s earliest mixtapes. It’s not a rejection of pop’s reach, but a deliberate re-entry into the noise.