アルカ：目と心を開きたい

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine: 

I hadn’t taken any drugs that night, but I remember thinking the song had an unsettling, almost biological quality, how it made me aware of my body like a hand pressed against – and then removed from – a windpipe.

I was 17. He was my first boyfriend. We understood each other for a cumulative ten seconds on any given day. He was the one who played FKA twigs’s Papi Pacify on the way to the party that night, this song that demands an intimacy so big you could choke on it. The low end was so low, so rumbling and tectonic, that it seemed dispatched from the world’s ancient core, its sub-bass threatening to crush the desperate falsetto; the unsteady percussion was like manicured nails tapping on smooth white bone. All the while, it never stopped moving, hissing, belching, stuttering, warping. When I stepped out of the car, I felt tilted. I’d never heard anything like it.

Or so I’d thought. In fact, by the time FKA twigs’s co-producer – the Barcelona-based Venezuelan experimentalist Alejandra Ghersi, who makes her glitchy, day-after-the-world-ends music under the name Arca – had helped the artist settle into that bruised, suspended voice on EP2, Arca had already become a ghost in the pop machine, the Jungian shadow of a modern avant-gardist seeking out new forms of danger. In her early twenties, Arca was emailing her “strangest” material to Kanye West, who, blunted off the frantic hip-hop sketches she made for her early Stretch EPs, sought her production consultancy for the paranoid, industrial sound of Yeezus. Two years later, the high dame of experimentalism herself, Björk, had developed such a faith in Arca’s vocabulary on 2013’s &&&&& that she borrowed it to articulate her own heartbreak, drafting her to help shape the lush, bioluminescent wreckage of Vulnicura. Kelela, Frank Ocean, Rosalía: everyone took their turns seeking out the oracle for the laboratory Arca made of the digital audio workstation and, in return, she showed how a beat can be disobedient, how music can sound like it has a mind of its own. When she released her self-titled album Arca, in 2017, it was like a belated introduction. 

That was then. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a contemporary electronic musician who doesn’t place Arca in their own personal Mount Rushmore (hers, for the record, comprises Aaliyah, Aphex Twin, Björk and Madonna). It’s been five years since the blissed-out maximalism of the Kick series, the five-album flex that revealed Arca’s own evolving self as her ultimate instrument. But if you average them all out, there isn’t a single year since 2012 that can’t be matched with its own left turn from Arca. As ever, her ear for texture is still patient and exacting. But with her new record, XXXXX, the artist is staging yet another rebirth. Her music remains a reminder that everything – the body, our feelings, the future and its social order – is subject to change. Everything, even the past, is only a draft.

Connor Garel How are you?

Arca I’m emotional. It’s been so long since I’ve announced a new album. It’s just … yeah, I can get right into it. There’s so much I want to express. I’ve had so much time to live with this music and I’m just elated to finally let go of this chapter and welcome in the next one. I’m already writing the album to follow.

CG I’d been wondering about that, because your label said you were travelling and doing sessions until 5am. I thought, the next album is about to come out and she’s already working towards a new one? But we can get to that later. Your last album came out over five years ago, when you closed up the Kick pentalogy. You’ve been doing things since then – scoring films and catwalk shows, a couple of DJ sets, some singles. You started painting and said it renewed your desire to return to music. Did something happen to make you distance yourself from the album as a form or was it more that you released, like, more than three hours of music and needed time to find new ideas?

A I like the way you phrased it, to think about Kick as this large body of work. It’s voluminous in scale and scope. If you follow the pattern of there being an album every year before 2021, since the beginning of Arca as a project for me, you’d have an album a year, even if you included the five-year silence. Unconsciously, it was a build-up of energy, because the autopilot of a constant flow had begun to be almost compulsive, as opposed to conducive to a deeper or different catharsis than what I’d known up until that point. My responsibility as an artist is to chase that catharsis, that alchemy. The traditional definition of catharsis is to purify. There’s something of a parallel there with alchemy, in that you start with something heavy and you turn it into joy. There were a lot of forms of growing that I hadn’t given myself the space and introversion to develop or focus on. I think that … I’m wondering if I should go there, but why not?

CG Go for it.

A I had a public-facing transition. And I was very open about the flux and the embracing of change – but also about the suffering that is a part of that. I needed to [steady] myself and find different ways of growing, because I still felt like I wasn’t allowing my roots to grow deeper. The pace of my output was keeping it that way. This is all something that I can only express in hindsight, because in the moment, I’m just following my intuition and the meaning comes after. To be perfectly honest, I had a heartbreak – a disillusionment and, for a moment, a loss of faith, of hope, of belief in my ability to feel integrated, to be harmonised with myself. I was having a lot of internal challenges and a lot of facing myself that I needed to do. So I never stopped playing shows. It’s important for me to feel that connection. It’s the most immediate thing. But to have new entries in my discography … I did make a record that I shelved and kept for myself, but that’s more of a footnote. Because even that journey was about remembering that sharing the music is a bonus, but I still get the therapy of it feeling like a message in a bottle. Maybe one part of me needed to hear something that another part of me was expressing at the time and, finally, that was also a catalyst. Besides painting, I mean. With painting, not having any formal instruction or technique, I was able to rediscover the immediate joy of making it up as you go along without thinking about theory or anything like that. I was able to fall back in love with making music. And I’m so happy about that, and that’s why I feel very emotional today, because it is the day I can finally open a new chapter.

“I had a heartbreak – a disillusionment and, for a moment, a loss of faith, of hope, of belief in my ability to feel integrated, to be harmonised with myself” – Arca 

CG I’ve been listening to XXXXX over the past few weeks and it has felt bodily, very internal. It’s funny you use the word introversion. Your music feels sensate, almost biological in the way that it’s constantly shifting and reconstituting itself, but here, there’s this almost frightening, exhausted panting at the end of Syncope and what sounds like skin being slashed on Finisher and bones breaking on Taconeando. It feels like some scary, aggressive, gothic Osmosis Jones, this trip into the body. What is it you were trying to conjure with these textures, or maybe the question is, what is it you meant to externalise?

A You’re referring to something I do consciously attempt to design, which is different chakras – you can call them energetic centres in the body that vibrate at different frequencies. It’s just physics. Ringing, humming, buzzing – your nervous system responds to each differently. With music, you can cause swells of energy and excitement and release and tension, harmony and dissonance. I surprised myself by the violence that is suggested in the music, as well as the tenderness and aftercare. When you simulate violence, which is what art allows, you’re able to work through and heal real bodily sensations and emotions that you can use for growth.

CG Is every project an effort at personal repair? Or did this one hold a particular gravity as a means of recovering?

A This may have been the angriest I’ve felt in a long time. And it took a lot of maturity to understand the function of each emotion. The way I face hardship is to skip to sadness a lot of the time. And if you do that you sometimes internalise a static in the environment, something that isn’t your fault. That’s the danger of skipping to sorrow without doing the necessary mourning or moving through anger. But anger has a necessary function. It can help you to recognise that things aren’t always your fault. If you don’t develop enough capacity to feel anger, to feel rage, then you skip to thinking it was all meant to be this way and the energy deflates. I want to open eyes and hearts especially to the difficult emotions, because that’s how we become free from being controlled by them and learn to live more intentionally, with more willpower. I don’t want to be a puppet of my fury, or fear, or anger. And because of that, I walk into this horror, to steep myself in the fury so I don’t have to compartmentalise it away from my dignity. There’s so much to be angry about and I do believe in compassion. So if this is a means and a bridge to further compassion and self-love so that I can connect more, then it fulfils its purpose. 

CG Do you want to enumerate some of the things you’re angry about?

A I guess a lack of bravery to face ignorance. Because of the patriarchy, there seems to be this immediacy in politics to jump to ostracising or scapegoating, to provide a reason to band together and police certain bodies unjustly. 

CG There’s this glitchy refrain throughout the album, these transmissions from the Diva Experimental.

A There was this amazing game, Jet Set Radio Future, and before that, Jet Grind Radio, on Dreamcast. In the game, you’re in Tokyo in the future, in an Orwellian time where the expression of counterculture is illegal, so anything that resists this regime is being censored and policed. The way these different graffiti artists stay connected is by tuning into this FM radio frequency, and the whole game you’re listening to this soundtrack of pirate-radio-DJ broadcasts, this transmission of resistance and clarity. And the music is amazing. Thinking about the idea of living in AI surveillance states and having to codify different forms of resistance so as to keep a light, even a love, alive and to fan the flames of community and mutancy – I was thinking about a lot of that, and the diva as a technology to rally together and empower. That’s where that character comes from.

CG Speaking of divas, how was working with Madonna on Confessions II? 

A The sessions with Madonna were incredible. Her energy is so nourishing. I remember the first time I met her I asked her politely if I should bring anything, and she said, “A sense of humour.” There’s something magical about the simplicity of that exchange. As much as I could idolise a hero, after getting to know her, I appreciate her that much more. She’s just so open and supportive. And, not to compare it, but the same is true in a very different way with Björk. I think about the different forms of motherhood that have guided me, maternal figures that have been lights in my times of not knowing which way was up and giving me melodies and lyrics I can sing to, to feel supported and encouraged. Maternal energy like that is lifesaving for sure. 

CG Yeah. It seems like you attract these larger-than-life figures. In your first year of making music as Arca, while you were living in New York City, you’re getting emails from Ye and Björk, and you sort of become the secret sauce, the shadow figure, that some of these big artists are tapping for new sounds. With that happening so soon, did it influence how you thought about your early musical self and what you could do?

A I always resisted anything I’d done before. After working on Yeezus I wanted to veer left, go more experimental. And then it became this dance with the industry, not wanting to overexpose the music, I guess. And when I say left, I just mean maybe less immediate, harder to decode – things that might be more cerebral and sensorial in a way that isn’t about catchiness or festival stages. I don’t know why I decided to answer this question in that way …

CG Kick had this sort of pop crossover appeal, and it’s like you’ve reverted to this mode that’s more natural to you, weirder and more experimental. It’s like you recruited a new audience to plunge them into something stranger than they expected.

A It’s not so much to recruit, it’s actually to demilitarise. I mean it symbolically, not literally, when I say that, in terms of the father ideal, there’s something about the patriarchy that needs to be dismantled. I want to make forms for the maternal and the feminine as energies that we can trust, so we can allow for change that is not nihilistic. Like, there’s still hope.

My fury is part of protecting my dignity and addressing an imbalance. So the idea of there being this swerve back into abstraction, maybe it does serve somewhat as an armour that can insulate my creativity from being too readily commodified, or from acting out the impulses that pop encourages. So even if my album sounds pop, I’m trying to use the format in a different way. My default mode of creation is exploratory and to resist autopilot. Instead of trying to have an idea of what I’m going to make beforehand, I try to create circumstances for my consciousness to enter these different trance-like states, and then I come out with an editing brain and try to translate that to the world. But that means I don’t know where the music is going until it feels right.

“I want to make forms for the maternal and the feminine as energies that we can trust, so we can allow for change that is not nihilistic. Like, there’s still hope” – Arca

CG You’ve talked about your love for [the American composer] Arthur Russell. He had that maxim of “first thought, best thought”. Did you surprise yourself at all or have any epiphanies while you were making this? I’m curious about how an act of creation can sometimes be outside the control of the creator.

A An amazing question. It’s poignant that we should mention the Buddhist maxim that Arthur Russell so abided by in the studio, because the irony of taking five whole years to finish another body of work proves that, indeed, I wasn’t guiding this process. [Laughs.] There are different points in a creative life, and you have moments where it’s critical and pivotal not to overthink and let neurosis block your decision-
making. For me, sometimes I have to finish something and then return to it in a new season. If I still like it, then it has survived the tides of being examined from the perspective of different self-states. 

I did a lot of refining that felt different from trying to capture lightning in a bottle in the way you do with the “first thought, best thought” system. The more time that passed, the more I felt confirmed. You’re wise to bring up control, because there’s a point when you aren’t sure if something is done but you have to take this leap of faith. It comes down to trusting yourself. There’s always a risk of being misunderstood. But that risk is worth taking for the effect of expressing yourself, even if you don’t understand the work just yet. I learn about my unconscious or my subconscious mind after I’ve shared the albums with the world. 

CG Did psychoanalysis change how you make art?

A I don’t know if I expected too much from analysis when I started. I did, like, a decade of formal analysis, uninterrupted. So I’ve come away from the experience with many … opinions. There are different ways of healing and maybe some forms need to be nonverbal. Language is such a restrictive medium. Words can’t always get as analytical as you are. There’s always this impossibility of conveying an emotion or experience. Analysis can help you feel seen and can help guide work into symbolism that appears in your dreams or your waking life. But I wouldn’t lionise analysis. There was a time when it felt empowering to have access to these concepts for the sake of having a language around, like, the archetypal or the shadow, but I would stop just short of suggesting that analysis is a way to deepen your experience of creating or becoming. It’s a useful tool for reaching an understanding, but becoming is often not about analysing. I can be very neurotic, so I can get into a language feedback loop and distract myself from feeling. So everything I’m doing now is a way of trying to return to a more grounded way of being, these full-body ways of understanding the world as opposed to through the intellect. I’m really excited about the songs for the next album, though. I’m so inspired right now because I’ve had so long to sit with this album. This is the first time the titling system of the mixtapes is crossing into the album format …

CG Well, XXXXX started as a mixtape, right?

A Yes, it started as one. The mixtapes were put together quite impulsively in a very punk way, erratic, not thinking too much about pristine quality, but rather concept and melody and rhythm … they were sort of like collages as opposed to structured songs. Everything about me just wants to embrace change now. Even the format, even the autopilot, I want to recontextualise it. It seemed fitting that Diva Experimental would almost usurp the album format, glitch out into the mainline, into this wider audience to put forth a more conceptual, textural and experimental programme, in the hopes of inspiring imaginations to think differently about texture and to consider this as a journey as opposed to just songs. That’s what my heart and mind craved at the time. It seemed right to open the valve to all this chaos and allow it to ring out and then follow it up with something more designed and joyous, which is what I’m already in the headspace for. Something joyous, warped and subversive.

CG What can you say about the new project? I’m trying to understand your speed.

A After this expression of rage, fury, static and noise – you know, after the dust settles, there remains an eternal love. I’m already thinking the response is going to be tenderness and softness, but in a hyper-charged, fuchsia, electrical way. Hardened like a diamond, with lots of energy, lots of light. Kind of like a mutant diva, if you will. That’s what I’m imagining – a return to vocals after this mysterious transformation and rebirth. Something more structured. No less energetic but something tender.

CG Anything else?

A I guess I would say thank you, to every Mutant that stands with me, that has followed me, to every new Mutant that feels a kindredness in the community of waving your freak flag high and proud, and following your love and your authenticity, and for supporting me. It gives meaning to my life in a profound way, and it’s an honour to be able to share such intimate songs, abstract or literal as they are, the good and the bad. To share the joy of pop music, but also the pain of mourning. There’s suffering that I’m still trying to face. But I don’t feel alone any more. And that makes all the difference.

Hair: Tomohiro Ohashi at MA+Talent. Make-up: Kathinka Gernant using CHANEL BEAUTY. Manicure: Delphine Aïssi using MANUCURIST. Photographic assistant: Jakob Müller-Meernach. Styling assistants: Charlotte Ghesquiere, Nina Marks and Sofia Igartua. Design assistant: Iiris Kamari. Production: 1718. Head of production: Flavie Smilenko. Producer: Pauline Mourguet

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally from 17 September 2026. Pre-order here. 

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine: 

I hadn’t taken any drugs that night, but I remember thinking the song had an unsettling, almost biological quality, how it made me aware of my body like a hand pressed against – and then removed from – a windpipe.

I was 17. He was my first boyfriend. We understood each other for a cumulative ten seconds on any given day. He was the one who played FKA twigs’s Papi Pacify on the way to the party that night, this song that demands an intimacy so big you could choke on it. The low end was so low, so rumbling and tectonic, that it seemed dispatched from the world’s ancient core, its sub-bass threatening to crush the desperate falsetto; the unsteady percussion was like manicured nails tapping on smooth white bone. All the while, it never stopped moving, hissing, belching, stuttering, warping. When I stepped out of the car, I felt tilted. I’d never heard anything like it.

Or so I’d thought. In fact, by the time FKA twigs’s co-producer – the Barcelona-based Venezuelan experimentalist Alejandra Ghersi, who makes her glitchy, day-after-the-world-ends music under the name Arca – had helped the artist settle into that bruised, suspended voice on EP2, Arca had already become a ghost in the pop machine, the Jungian shadow of a modern avant-gardist seeking out new forms of danger. In her early twenties, Arca was emailing her “strangest” material to Kanye West, who, blunted off the frantic hip-hop sketches she made for her early Stretch EPs, sought her production consultancy for the paranoid, industrial sound of Yeezus. Two years later, the high dame of experimentalism herself, Björk, had developed such a faith in Arca’s vocabulary on 2013’s &&&&& that she borrowed it to articulate her own heartbreak, drafting her to help shape the lush, bioluminescent wreckage of Vulnicura. Kelela, Frank Ocean, Rosalía: everyone took their turns seeking out the oracle for the laboratory Arca made of the digital audio workstation and, in return, she showed how a beat can be disobedient, how music can sound like it has a mind of its own. When she released her self-titled album Arca, in 2017, it was like a belated introduction. 

That was then. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a contemporary electronic musician who doesn’t place Arca in their own personal Mount Rushmore (hers, for the record, comprises Aaliyah, Aphex Twin, Björk and Madonna). It’s been five years since the blissed-out maximalism of the Kick series, the five-album flex that revealed Arca’s own evolving self as her ultimate instrument. But if you average them all out, there isn’t a single year since 2012 that can’t be matched with its own left turn from Arca. As ever, her ear for texture is still patient and exacting. But with her new record, XXXXX, the artist is staging yet another rebirth. Her music remains a reminder that everything – the body, our feelings, the future and its social order – is subject to change. Everything, even the past, is only a draft.

Connor Garel How are you?

Arca I’m emotional. It’s been so long since I’ve announced a new album. It’s just … yeah, I can get right into it. There’s so much I want to express. I’ve had so much time to live with this music and I’m just elated to finally let go of this chapter and welcome in the next one. I’m already writing the album to follow.

CG I’d been wondering about that, because your label said you were travelling and doing sessions until 5am. I thought, the next album is about to come out and she’s already working towards a new one? But we can get to that later. Your last album came out over five years ago, when you closed up the Kick pentalogy. You’ve been doing things since then – scoring films and catwalk shows, a couple of DJ sets, some singles. You started painting and said it renewed your desire to return to music. Did something happen to make you distance yourself from the album as a form or was it more that you released, like, more than three hours of music and needed time to find new ideas?

A I like the way you phrased it, to think about Kick as this large body of work. It’s voluminous in scale and scope. If you follow the pattern of there being an album every year before 2021, since the beginning of Arca as a project for me, you’d have an album a year, even if you included the five-year silence. Unconsciously, it was a build-up of energy, because the autopilot of a constant flow had begun to be almost compulsive, as opposed to conducive to a deeper or different catharsis than what I’d known up until that point. My responsibility as an artist is to chase that catharsis, that alchemy. The traditional definition of catharsis is to purify. There’s something of a parallel there with alchemy, in that you start with something heavy and you turn it into joy. There were a lot of forms of growing that I hadn’t given myself the space and introversion to develop or focus on. I think that … I’m wondering if I should go there, but why not?

CG Go for it.

A I had a public-facing transition. And I was very open about the flux and the embracing of change – but also about the suffering that is a part of that. I needed to [steady] myself and find different ways of growing, because I still felt like I wasn’t allowing my roots to grow deeper. The pace of my output was keeping it that way. This is all something that I can only express in hindsight, because in the moment, I’m just following my intuition and the meaning comes after. To be perfectly honest, I had a heartbreak – a disillusionment and, for a moment, a loss of faith, of hope, of belief in my ability to feel integrated, to be harmonised with myself. I was having a lot of internal challenges and a lot of facing myself that I needed to do. So I never stopped playing shows. It’s important for me to feel that connection. It’s the most immediate thing. But to have new entries in my discography … I did make a record that I shelved and kept for myself, but that’s more of a footnote. Because even that journey was about remembering that sharing the music is a bonus, but I still get the therapy of it feeling like a message in a bottle. Maybe one part of me needed to hear something that another part of me was expressing at the time and, finally, that was also a catalyst. Besides painting, I mean. With painting, not having any formal instruction or technique, I was able to rediscover the immediate joy of making it up as you go along without thinking about theory or anything like that. I was able to fall back in love with making music. And I’m so happy about that, and that’s why I feel very emotional today, because it is the day I can finally open a new chapter.

“I had a heartbreak – a disillusionment and, for a moment, a loss of faith, of hope, of belief in my ability to feel integrated, to be harmonised with myself” – Arca 

CG I’ve been listening to XXXXX over the past few weeks and it has felt bodily, very internal. It’s funny you use the word introversion. Your music feels sensate, almost biological in the way that it’s constantly shifting and reconstituting itself, but here, there’s this almost frightening, exhausted panting at the end of Syncope and what sounds like skin being slashed on Finisher and bones breaking on Taconeando. It feels like some scary, aggressive, gothic Osmosis Jones, this trip into the body. What is it you were trying to conjure with these textures, or maybe the question is, what is it you meant to externalise?

A You’re referring to something I do consciously attempt to design, which is different chakras – you can call them energetic centres in the body that vibrate at different frequencies. It’s just physics. Ringing, humming, buzzing – your nervous system responds to each differently. With music, you can cause swells of energy and excitement and release and tension, harmony and dissonance. I surprised myself by the violence that is suggested in the music, as well as the tenderness and aftercare. When you simulate violence, which is what art allows, you’re able to work through and heal real bodily sensations and emotions that you can use for growth.

CG Is every project an effort at personal repair? Or did this one hold a particular gravity as a means of recovering?

A This may have been the angriest I’ve felt in a long time. And it took a lot of maturity to understand the function of each emotion. The way I face hardship is to skip to sadness a lot of the time. And if you do that you sometimes internalise a static in the environment, something that isn’t your fault. That’s the danger of skipping to sorrow without doing the necessary mourning or moving through anger. But anger has a necessary function. It can help you to recognise that things aren’t always your fault. If you don’t develop enough capacity to feel anger, to feel rage, then you skip to thinking it was all meant to be this way and the energy deflates. I want to open eyes and hearts especially to the difficult emotions, because that’s how we become free from being controlled by them and learn to live more intentionally, with more willpower. I don’t want to be a puppet of my fury, or fear, or anger. And because of that, I walk into this horror, to steep myself in the fury so I don’t have to compartmentalise it away from my dignity. There’s so much to be angry about and I do believe in compassion. So if this is a means and a bridge to further compassion and self-love so that I can connect more, then it fulfils its purpose. 

CG Do you want to enumerate some of the things you’re angry about?

A I guess a lack of bravery to face ignorance. Because of the patriarchy, there seems to be this immediacy in politics to jump to ostracising or scapegoating, to provide a reason to band together and police certain bodies unjustly. 

CG There’s this glitchy refrain throughout the album, these transmissions from the Diva Experimental.

A There was this amazing game, Jet Set Radio Future, and before that, Jet Grind Radio, on Dreamcast. In the game, you’re in Tokyo in the future, in an Orwellian time where the expression of counterculture is illegal, so anything that resists this regime is being censored and policed. The way these different graffiti artists stay connected is by tuning into this FM radio frequency, and the whole game you’re listening to this soundtrack of pirate-radio-DJ broadcasts, this transmission of resistance and clarity. And the music is amazing. Thinking about the idea of living in AI surveillance states and having to codify different forms of resistance so as to keep a light, even a love, alive and to fan the flames of community and mutancy – I was thinking about a lot of that, and the diva as a technology to rally together and empower. That’s where that character comes from.

CG Speaking of divas, how was working with Madonna on Confessions II? 

A The sessions with Madonna were incredible. Her energy is so nourishing. I remember the first time I met her I asked her politely if I should bring anything, and she said, “A sense of humour.” There’s something magical about the simplicity of that exchange. As much as I could idolise a hero, after getting to know her, I appreciate her that much more. She’s just so open and supportive. And, not to compare it, but the same is true in a very different way with Björk. I think about the different forms of motherhood that have guided me, maternal figures that have been lights in my times of not knowing which way was up and giving me melodies and lyrics I can sing to, to feel supported and encouraged. Maternal energy like that is lifesaving for sure. 

CG Yeah. It seems like you attract these larger-than-life figures. In your first year of making music as Arca, while you were living in New York City, you’re getting emails from Ye and Björk, and you sort of become the secret sauce, the shadow figure, that some of these big artists are tapping for new sounds. With that happening so soon, did it influence how you thought about your early musical self and what you could do?

A I always resisted anything I’d done before. After working on Yeezus I wanted to veer left, go more experimental. And then it became this dance with the industry, not wanting to overexpose the music, I guess. And when I say left, I just mean maybe less immediate, harder to decode – things that might be more cerebral and sensorial in a way that isn’t about catchiness or festival stages. I don’t know why I decided to answer this question in that way …

CG Kick had this sort of pop crossover appeal, and it’s like you’ve reverted to this mode that’s more natural to you, weirder and more experimental. It’s like you recruited a new audience to plunge them into something stranger than they expected.

A It’s not so much to recruit, it’s actually to demilitarise. I mean it symbolically, not literally, when I say that, in terms of the father ideal, there’s something about the patriarchy that needs to be dismantled. I want to make forms for the maternal and the feminine as energies that we can trust, so we can allow for change that is not nihilistic. Like, there’s still hope.

My fury is part of protecting my dignity and addressing an imbalance. So the idea of there being this swerve back into abstraction, maybe it does serve somewhat as an armour that can insulate my creativity from being too readily commodified, or from acting out the impulses that pop encourages. So even if my album sounds pop, I’m trying to use the format in a different way. My default mode of creation is exploratory and to resist autopilot. Instead of trying to have an idea of what I’m going to make beforehand, I try to create circumstances for my consciousness to enter these different trance-like states, and then I come out with an editing brain and try to translate that to the world. But that means I don’t know where the music is going until it feels right.

“I want to make forms for the maternal and the feminine as energies that we can trust, so we can allow for change that is not nihilistic. Like, there’s still hope” – Arca

CG You’ve talked about your love for [the American composer] Arthur Russell. He had that maxim of “first thought, best thought”. Did you surprise yourself at all or have any epiphanies while you were making this? I’m curious about how an act of creation can sometimes be outside the control of the creator.

A An amazing question. It’s poignant that we should mention the Buddhist maxim that Arthur Russell so abided by in the studio, because the irony of taking five whole years to finish another body of work proves that, indeed, I wasn’t guiding this process. [Laughs.] There are different points in a creative life, and you have moments where it’s critical and pivotal not to overthink and let neurosis block your decision-
making. For me, sometimes I have to finish something and then return to it in a new season. If I still like it, then it has survived the tides of being examined from the perspective of different self-states. 

I did a lot of refining that felt different from trying to capture lightning in a bottle in the way you do with the “first thought, best thought” system. The more time that passed, the more I felt confirmed. You’re wise to bring up control, because there’s a point when you aren’t sure if something is done but you have to take this leap of faith. It comes down to trusting yourself. There’s always a risk of being misunderstood. But that risk is worth taking for the effect of expressing yourself, even if you don’t understand the work just yet. I learn about my unconscious or my subconscious mind after I’ve shared the albums with the world. 

CG Did psychoanalysis change how you make art?

A I don’t know if I expected too much from analysis when I started. I did, like, a decade of formal analysis, uninterrupted. So I’ve come away from the experience with many … opinions. There are different ways of healing and maybe some forms need to be nonverbal. Language is such a restrictive medium. Words can’t always get as analytical as you are. There’s always this impossibility of conveying an emotion or experience. Analysis can help you feel seen and can help guide work into symbolism that appears in your dreams or your waking life. But I wouldn’t lionise analysis. There was a time when it felt empowering to have access to these concepts for the sake of having a language around, like, the archetypal or the shadow, but I would stop just short of suggesting that analysis is a way to deepen your experience of creating or becoming. It’s a useful tool for reaching an understanding, but becoming is often not about analysing. I can be very neurotic, so I can get into a language feedback loop and distract myself from feeling. So everything I’m doing now is a way of trying to return to a more grounded way of being, these full-body ways of understanding the world as opposed to through the intellect. I’m really excited about the songs for the next album, though. I’m so inspired right now because I’ve had so long to sit with this album. This is the first time the titling system of the mixtapes is crossing into the album format …

CG Well, XXXXX started as a mixtape, right?

A Yes, it started as one. The mixtapes were put together quite impulsively in a very punk way, erratic, not thinking too much about pristine quality, but rather concept and melody and rhythm … they were sort of like collages as opposed to structured songs. Everything about me just wants to embrace change now. Even the format, even the autopilot, I want to recontextualise it. It seemed fitting that Diva Experimental would almost usurp the album format, glitch out into the mainline, into this wider audience to put forth a more conceptual, textural and experimental programme, in the hopes of inspiring imaginations to think differently about texture and to consider this as a journey as opposed to just songs. That’s what my heart and mind craved at the time. It seemed right to open the valve to all this chaos and allow it to ring out and then follow it up with something more designed and joyous, which is what I’m already in the headspace for. Something joyous, warped and subversive.

CG What can you say about the new project? I’m trying to understand your speed.

A After this expression of rage, fury, static and noise – you know, after the dust settles, there remains an eternal love. I’m already thinking the response is going to be tenderness and softness, but in a hyper-charged, fuchsia, electrical way. Hardened like a diamond, with lots of energy, lots of light. Kind of like a mutant diva, if you will. That’s what I’m imagining – a return to vocals after this mysterious transformation and rebirth. Something more structured. No less energetic but something tender.

CG Anything else?

A I guess I would say thank you, to every Mutant that stands with me, that has followed me, to every new Mutant that feels a kindredness in the community of waving your freak flag high and proud, and following your love and your authenticity, and for supporting me. It gives meaning to my life in a profound way, and it’s an honour to be able to share such intimate songs, abstract or literal as they are, the good and the bad. To share the joy of pop music, but also the pain of mourning. There’s suffering that I’m still trying to face. But I don’t feel alone any more. And that makes all the difference.

Hair: Tomohiro Ohashi at MA+Talent. Make-up: Kathinka Gernant using CHANEL BEAUTY. Manicure: Delphine Aïssi using MANUCURIST. Photographic assistant: Jakob Müller-Meernach. Styling assistants: Charlotte Ghesquiere, Nina Marks and Sofia Igartua. Design assistant: Iiris Kamari. Production: 1718. Head of production: Flavie Smilenko. Producer: Pauline Mourguet

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally from 17 September 2026. Pre-order here.