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Within Arca’s catalogue is a rich tradition of projects with enigmatic, five-character titles, from her groundbreaking debut mixtape, 2013’s <i>&&&&&</i>, to 2020’s <i>@@@@@</i>, an hour-long collage presented as a single track. The Venezuelan musician carries on the custom with <i>XXXXX</i>, her first full-length release since 2021’s <i>kiCK iiiii</i>, the final installment of her sprawling <i>Kick</i> series. After premiering the album in full via a two-hour Diva.Experimental broadcast staged live from an abandoned factory in Barcelona, <i>XXXXX</i> arrives as a slippery expansion of the producer’s world-building project, pushing the limits of selfhood and sound. Here her shape-shifting songs mostly stray from the club-friendly reggaetón of the earlier <i>Kick</i> installments and venture into darker, more disorienting territory, toying with harsh noise, metallic textures and rhythms borrowed from an alternate dimension while probing XXXXX-rated themes on red-blooded tracks like <b>“Fxck”</b>.