Arca: Kick ii, iii, iiii, iiiii review | Alexis Petridis's albums of the week

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Four new albums of extravagantly warped electronics offer listeners a lot to take in – and her most pop-focused music to date

For the best part of a decade, Alejandra Ghersi Rodriguez has built her career as Arca on a kind of idiosyncratic, confrontational maximalism. Her signature style involves densely woven tapestries of warped electronics, seemingly designed to engulf the listener. The accompanying visuals are similarly extravagant, featuring Arca as a grotesque pillar-box red mutant, or with prosthetic appendages and flame-throwers for arms, or as a naked, androgynous being attached to the bonnet of a car with a series of terrifying-looking mechanical devices. The latter appeared accompanying Arca’s 2020 single @@@@@: a solitary track that was 62 minutes long. Last year, she released the first “official remixes” of her material: 100 of them, at once, all of the same song. Arca, you get the feeling, does not place a tremendous amount of store by the theory that less is more.

Her latest release feels similarly overwhelming. She recently announced three new albums, follow-ups to 2020’s Grammy-nominated KiCk i, to be released simultaneously. It turns out there are actually four: KICK ii, KicK iii, kick iiii and kiCK iiiii (released as a surprise today) that between them amount to 44 songs and 135 minutes of music. It’s a lot to take in, but that isn’t a shock given her previous form. What is surprising is that this is her most obviously pop-focused and straightforward music to date.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian