FOR MANY WISHFUL LISTENERS, Arca sounded trans long before she publicly identified as such. Even if the Venezuelan-born producer and vocalist hadn’t named her debut album, Xen (2014), after a feminine alter-ego she’d cultivated since childhood, the music, which writhed and oozed like a pupating insect, would have invited such a reading: It stirred with unstable and viscous electronic tones, hinting at identity in flux. Mutant, in 2015, followed suit; both were tellingly illustrated by computer-generated images of ambiguous bodies spilling, tumorous, from their own skins. Before she changed her name and pronouns, Alejandra Ghersi made synthesized music that sounded out the longing to become.
The hallmarks of Arca’s early years included detuned synthesizer patches, notes which sagged off of their true pitch, and smeared, distorted vocals that yielded only glimpses of language. In 2017, a self-titled album unsheathed her voice for a series of songs that folded lust and death into the same full-throated howls. She inched toward ripe pop pleasure on Arca, especially with “Reverie” and “Desafio,” but ultimately retreated into the abject loneliness that pervades the bulk of her catalog. With her fourth LP, KiCk i, Arca plunges into modes she had only flirted with before. It is the first of her albums to embrace excitement and joy, to step out from of isolated melancholy into a sense of communal belonging. Still, on the album’s cover, she stands alone, her feet strapped into the metallic hooves she first wore in the 2015 music video for “Reverie,” her hands gripping a pair of prosthetic claws—a cyborg figure, armed and ready.