![]() ![]() ![]() It starts out floating her vocals, singing a very Sia-esque melody, over soft electronics, but gradually ratchets up the tension and chaos: the rhythms chatter, a relentless house kick drum fades in, a plethora of warped noises start to crowd her out. The album scrapes away the familiarity the sound has accrued over the years – the icy synths and distorted voices of Rakata the frantic, panicky-sounding Tiro – something it also succeeds in doing to the voice of power-ballad queen Sia on Born Yesterday. KICK ii, however, is based largely around reggaeton rhythms, which crossed over from Puerto Rican clubs to mainstream pop a long time ago. At the other extreme, you could bill kiCK iiiii as Arca’s take on ambient music, although it follows Aphex Twin’s interpretation of the genre, where moments of blissed-out loveliness coexist with disquiet: Amrep’s long, slow descent into distorted darkness, for example the sense of prickly unease that lurks behind Fireprayer’s twinkling melody. Señorita appears to be Arca’s oblique answer to the plea of one fan during a lockdown livestream, who wanted her to “MAKE VOGUE MUSIC PLEEEEEASE”: it recalls both Timbaland’s work with Missy Elliot and the fierce strain of 90s New York house embodied by Ride Committee’s Get Huh! or Tronco Traxx’s Walk for Me. She distorts her vocals in ways that sometimes remind you of Prince as his female alter-ego Camille, or the helium samples of old hardcore, though they generally sound quite nightmarish. It’s a restless, challenging listen – beats that sound like gunfire, churning and gibbering electronic noise. She bills KicK iii as “mutant club music” – the kind that seems designed to soundtrack that moment in the small hours when your indulgences overwhelm you, where everything blurs and spins out of control. What is surprising is that this is her most obviously pop-focused and straightforward music to date. It’s a lot to take in, but that isn’t a shock given her previous form. 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 47 songs and over 145 minutes of music. She recently announced three new albums, follow-ups to 2020’s Grammy-nominated KiCk i, to be released simultaneously. Her latest release feels similarly overwhelming.
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