Arca has announced the release date, track list, and cover art for his third studio album, eponymously titled Arca, out April 7, 2017. His first release on XL Recordings, the record follows 2014’s Xen and 2015’s Mutant.
“Here’s my voice and all my guts: feel free to judge it. It’s like a bullfight: you’re watching emotional violence for pleasure. So this is a character who, almost as a mockery of the transaction, goes uncomfortably deep, into self-mutilation. ‘You want gore? Here’s gore’,” Arca says in a statement about the album.
The album announcement coincides with the release of first track “Piel” (Spanish for ‘skin’), on which Arca debuts his singing voice in a beautiful, haunting, somewhat ecclesiastical vocal over a mic-feedback style melody and doomy, atmospheric synths.
Long-time collaborator Jesse Kanda provides the album artwork, seen in the “Piel” video above. A super close-up of Arca’s face is manipulated in Kanda’s unnerving signature hyperreal style with bruised eyes, black-green glassy pupils, sallow skin, black teeth, and sharpened areas of pores and hair follicles.
A previously announced album title, Reverie, appears on the current track list, which you can check out below in full, with some unofficial English translations of the Spanish that we made using Google translate.
Arca’s biggest headline show to date has been announced for three weeks after the album release, on April 28 at London’s Roundhouse. Tickets go on sale this Friday, February 24.
Arca track list:
Piel [Skin]
Anoche [Last Night]
Saunter
Urchin
Reverie
Castration
Sin Rumbo [Without Rumbo]
Coraje [Courage]
Whip
Desafío [Challenge]
Fugaces [Fleeting]
Miel [Honey]
Child
Credits
Text Charlotte Gush
Photography Daniel Shea courtesy XL Recordings