Arca Continues to Build New Worlds with “Prada/Rakata”

The dual singles arrive ahead of “KICK ii,” out December 3 via XL.
Arca Continues to Build New Worlds with “Prada/Rakata”

The dual singles arrive ahead of “KICK ii,” out December 3 via XL.

Words: Margaret Farrell

November 03, 2021

Last year Arca released KICK i, and recently announced its follow-up album KICK ii which is coming on December 3. Today, she’s shared the dual single “Prada/Rakata” along with a visual for both tracks, and, wow, it’s mind-blowing. Arca not only creates unforgettable realms of music, but she brings them closer to dissolving our reality with the detailed visual companions made with Frederik Heyman.

“​​’Prada’ is about celebrating psychosexual versatility,” she says. “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 möbius 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.”

She continues on about “Rakata,” saying it’s “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.”

Watch “Prada/Rakata” below and pre-order KICK ii here.