Arca: Arca [XL]

Why you'll love it

This pressing comes in a gatefold jacket with a 12-inch, eight-page booklet and a download code. Pitchfork gave it Best New Music and named it the best experimental album of 2017, and Crack Magazine and Dazed both ranked it the year's best album.

This edition

• Gatefold jacket
• 8-page booklet
• Download card included

About the album

By 2017 Alejandra Ghersi had produced for Kanye West, FKA Twigs and Björk, and made two albums of thrilling, fractured instrumentals as Arca. It was Björk who encouraged her to sing on her own music, and Arca said she isn't sure she would have done it without that push.

She wrote and produced everything herself, handling the vocals, mixing and programming too, and nearly every lyric was improvised and kept as it came out if it felt pure enough. She sings in Spanish, her first language and, as she put it, the one she processes emotion in. "Piel" is bare and fragile, "Anoche" tips its hat to a Björk song, "Reverie" swells into operatic drama, "Desafío" has a pop pulse, and "Saunter" and "Urchin" glitch and shimmer. Matt Colton mastered it, and longtime collaborator Jesse Kanda made the artwork.

Metacritic logged a score of 87 from 20 reviews, Mixmag and Time Out New York put it in their year-end lists, and the album charted in Belgium and Spain as well as on Billboard's Heatseekers list. Play it loud enough and the neighbours will assume you've taken up opera, which does wonders for one's reputation.

Also at Kops: more Arca on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On XL Recordings (cat# XLLP834), the 2017 album.