Pop music, it seems, has finally caught up with Arca, née Alejandra Ghersi. The Venezuelan artist has helped shape the sound of hip-hop, indie-pop, and R&B over the last decade, making sizable contributions to projects by Kanye West, Björk, and Kelela, while toiling away at her solo work in a separate, more challenging lane. After three albums of apocalyptic, ambient tone poems, Arca’s pop and avant-garde interests converge on Kick I. It’s an anti-pop pop album, a distillation of the producer-singer-arranger extraordinaire’s ambitions and a statement of exuberance from an artist who’s known to deal in gloom.
Where Arca’s past efforts sought to express states of dissociation, rendering a consciousness flitting in and out of reality, the songs on Kick I are noticeably present and tuned-in. This mood is reportedly due to newfound romance and reaching a comfort with her hybrid identity as both non-binary and a trans woman, and Kick I feels buoyed and fueled by these personal landmarks. In the past, Arca opined about the discomforts of being who she is, but on the album’s opening track, “Nonbinary,” she practically gloats: “I’m special, you can’t tell me otherwise…What a treat/Is is to be/non-binary.” This confident swagger abounds across the album, and Arca’s spirit of self-affirmation is well-earned.
Arca’s gender identity is infused in the playfulness of her lyrics and compositions. Despite the addition of actual pop hooks throughout Kick I, Arca’s beats continue to emphasize destabilization and change. Her songs are all bridge—stretches of evolution from one idea or mindset to the next. Just when you’ve grown accustomed to a sound or riff, the floor drops out, shifting to another mode and vibe altogether. The production oscillates wildly between harsh and smooth, as in the way the kinetic, abrasive “Riquiquí” segues into the graceful ballad “Calor”; strings and clanking percussion mix, squaring off in striking juxtaposition.
The album’s lyrics, sung in equal parts Spanish and English, toy with and complicate notions of gender and desire. On “La Chiqui” (which roughly translates to “babydoll”), fellow electro-industrial popsmith Sophie has anarchic fun with pronouns, knowingly upending binaries: “She is my boyfriend/Flowers of my love/He is my best friend/Roots blowing up…the schism it shifts, it rips…” “Machote” and “Mequetrefe” express Arca’s yearning for a hyper-masculine man who’s an accomplished lover and, of course, “knows how to shake it.” The latter song’s title is Venezuelan slang for a type of cocksure man, often used derogatorily, but for whom Arca makes no apologies for wanting, even delightfully asserting that she “deserves” him.
Arca’s always been amusing—after all, she once titled a song “Front Load”—but Kick I is a new high water-mark for her leftfield one-liners and absurd metaphors, all tied to her assurance and strength. “Rip the Slit” winds its way through a series of tongue-twisting phrases and fragments that speak frankly of anatomical mutation, delivered in lurching, pitched-up vocals. And on “Riquiquí,” she vividly, hilariously invokes both mangos and mayonnaise.
“Riquiquí” includes a repeated description of “a white metal rose,” whose paradoxical mix of materials perfectly encapsulates the joining of the natural and the mechanical across Arca’s music. Her beats move and operate based on collisions of one element crashing into another or the cacophony emitted by many noises firing off at once. And true to her habit of straddling binaries, the sonics on Kick I have a real dimensionality and tangibility—as in what sounds like wood splintering on “La Chiqui”—even though they also have a kind of wispy, cyber-weightlessness, as if they could self-destruct at any given moment.
On the off chance that the forces colliding are both bodies, Arca can be tender. She croons about the unity of becoming one with a lover on “No Queda Nada,” the album’s beautifully patient closing track. “Nothing left in me that you haven’t touched,” she lilts, “Not even a corner left/Into which your warmth hasn’t seeped.” The “you” could be a paramour, but it’s also possible Arca is talking about coming into her own. Thus, Kick I is a sometimes quite bawdy love letter, both to the self and a potential partner. By far the bounciest, most ecstatic song cycle of Arca’s career, the album is a celebration of actualization, whether that’s spurned by finding harmony internally or in communion with another.
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