Image: Bruno Staub
Ahead of her much anticipated album KICK ii – out 3 December on XL Recordings, avant-pop artist Arca has shared a new music video for tracks Prada and Rakata. Created in collaboration with a team of 3D animators and effects designers led by Frederik Heyman, the evocative music video sees various avatars of Arca placed in alien dystopian scenarios, including a harnessed and stirrup-bound Arca seemingly giving birth to eggs of molten lava and Arca as a gargantuan machine-gun / mermaid hybrid being constructed atop a pile of naked extraterrestrials.
The video also sees the album art for KICK ii and standalone single Incendio come to life. The visuals offer some insight into the deeper symbolism behind the music on KICK ii, which so far has also included the track Born Yesterday with Sia. Prada and Rakata both continue the Latinx and reggaeton pop direction of her recent music, with both tracks throbbing with a sweaty, decaying cumbian rhythm. Speaking on each tack, Arca offered:
“Prada” is about celebrating psychosexual versatility; a song explicitly about transness and nonbinary modes of relating the sexual energy of the collective subconscious as a celebration of life; it is a song about defying shame and healing ancestral wounds; about the futurity of desire and love as a moebius strip; about kink as an engine, about sex and love, and above all else about simultaneity of being able to surrender and submit as well as being able to overpower and dominate within a collaboratively created space of consent; to throw glitter in the face of barking demons so as to let them know that love spans fully across breadth of mystery of life and death.
“Rakata” is a song about seduction, about wanting to devour the entire world out of a desire to fuck, without shame, free from condemnation, about sex as a life impulse in the face of death; it’s also a wink and nod to the internal heat generated by the hot and humid conditions that birthed Latinx music, a reverence to regeton royalty Wisin y Yandel, tambores venezolanos, the furruco—an instrument I hear as sub bass technology, contemporary Venezuelan folklore, life and eroticism birthed near the heat of the equator.
Themes of transness, queer sexual desire and abjection have been essential to Arca’s work, and KICK ii is shaping up to be one of her most distinct explorations into these thematic concerns yet. Watch the music video below, and pre-order KICK ii here.
