Arca reconfigures the role of the diva in her new album 'XXXXX'

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Set us as preferred In an abandoned warehouse in Barcelona, the diva concealed her face beneath a helmet.Her hair moved like a black waterfall as she strutted, bare feet arched, as if in heels.

The heels do appear later, click-clacking as the camera reveals a screen on her pelvic region, and as she reveals her face, growling a provocative verse from “Taconeando” — “Yo sé que tu quieres que me venga.”Throughout the course of her July 27 “XXXXX” livestream, which beamed her first album in five years to the world, the artist-producer Alejandra Ghersi Rodríguez, best known as Arca, bathed in the warm hue of red light and strobes — and later, what seemed to be blood.She blew kisses to the camera and toward the sky.She let out vocoded screams as she writhed on an industrial floor and lay resplendently upon a mountain of sand.

She covered her bikini-clad body in peonies, visually echoing an Ana Mendieta “Silhueta.”It would be too simplistic to label “XXXXX” as a return to form for the expansive Venezuelan artist; this record is more than a pop-timized syncretization of her previous electronic experimentations, such as her 2013 debut EP “&&&&&,” or the hourlong single “@@@@@.”Lest we forget her celebrated self-titled album in 2017, which was the first time we heard Arca’s voice untreated to the doleful melody of a tonada, the Venezuelan folk genre popularized by llanero troubadour Simón Díaz; or the wildly ambitious five-album “Kick” cycle, in which she indulged in the Caribbean sounds of dembow and reggaeton, then melded them together into one ambient stream, with her signature glitchy flair.The album cover of “XXXXX,” which calls to mind one of Swiss artist’s H.R.Giger’s biomechanoid machine-human chimeras, nods to the much-ness inherent here: specifically the ...