kick iiii
Compared to the strutting reggaetón of *KICK ii* and the demonic club experiments of *KicK iii*, *kick iiii* captures Arca at her most serene. The crooning “Xenomorphgirl” is a kind of cyborg lullaby; “Esuna” curls up like a kitten in the soft swirls of Oliver Coates’ strings. But serenity is not the same as docility, and *kick iiii* also features some of Arca’s most coolly triumphant work to date. On the self-empowerment anthem “Queer,” Planningtorock testifies to their “tears of power,” while on “Alien Inside,” Garbage’s Shirley Manson solemnly intones the virtues of Arca’s self-proclaimed “mutant faith” over a shimmering shoegaze backdrop. Most affecting of all is Arca’s own proclamation on “Lost Woman Found”: “I’ve been walking toward the light for years now/And it’s the first time I feel the sun’s warmth on my skin, now that it’s my own/A lost woman, found.” The quest for one’s true identity has long been at the center of Arca’s work, and here at the heart of her sprawling, futuristic bildungsroman, she channels years of trauma into something like peace.
The simultaneous release of Alejandra Ghersi’s four new albums—that’s 47 songs, two and a half hours of music—blends the peaks with the valleys
The Venezuelan producer explores her upbringing and spiritual worldview with this boundary-busting new collection
Arca unleashes her daring mutant universe in the completed KICK anthology
With four new works, the Venezuelan producer delivers a pentalogy that can mesmerise and terrify
On kick iiii, Arca peels away the musical and emotional armor of the Kick project's previous volumes to reveal one of her most consistently beautiful works.
The transgressive icon wraps up her Kick quintet in typically enigmatic style with some highly collaborative and enormously creative new sounds
As a nonbinary trans woman raised in Caracas, Venezuela — at the height of social unrest — and suburban Connecticut, Arca (aka Alejandra Ghe...
Musical multi-hyphenate Arca understands more than any artist in the public eye that flux is a natural part of the human condition. It’s illuminated in her music, performance, visuals, and whatever medium she uses to illustrate facets of her self-expression. The world Arca has created through her art defies any sort of binary, be it of gender, genre, or form itself. In-between states are explored endlessly, and liberation is found in entropy and chaos.
The five-part Arca opus KICK: there's a *lot* going on here – and most of it is very good. This relentless producer refuses to be boxed in
Four new albums of extravagantly warped electronics offer listeners a lot to take in – and her most pop-focused music to date
Alejandra Ghersi – Arca – is one of the most influential musicians on the planet in the last decade. Even aside from working with huge names like Björk and Kanye West, her ultra-detailed, high drama, electronic abstractions have set the pace for a legion of artists from very underground to ultra-pop.