Arca

Few artists have bent musical form to their will quite like Arca, a.k.a. Alejandra Ghersi Rodríguez. Having invented her very own style from the collision of pop and experimental electronic sound design, the Caracas-born, Barcelona-based visionary ranks alongside icons like Björk, Kanye West, ROSALÍA and Frank Ocean; small wonder that she has worked with all of them. Born in 1989, Arca got her start in the early 2010s crafting mind-melting club-music mutations and then, with 2017’s Arca, stepped up to the mic and laid her soul bare in heart-stopping operatic fashion. With 2020’s reggaetón-influenced KiCk i, the artist demonstrated her mastery of pop, and the following year’s four-volume follow-up saw her talents growing in every direction—more melodious, more bewildering, more vulnerable, more her. As a nonbinary trans woman, Arca puts questions of identity at the centre of her work, and that only makes her ongoing artistic evolution more thrilling to behold: The search for self and the quest for authentic expression are encoded in every dazzling waveform.