Arca

Alejandra Ghersi, who records as Arca, spent her adolescence in Caracas building beats under the alias Nuuro before enrolling at NYU's Clive Davis Institute and re-emerging with a run of skeletal, unsettling EPs that caught the attention of Kanye West's production team. The records that followed - Xen, Mutant, and a self-titled album that put her voice at the center for the first time - fused industrial clatter, IDM's jagged rhythm programming, and the ghost of Venezuelan reggaeton into something closer to sound sculpture than pop music. Her production credits read like a map of the last decade's most adventurous records: Björk's Vulnicura and Utopia, FKA twigs' early EPs, tracks for Frank Ocean, Rosalía, and Kelela. Between 2020 and 2021 she released the five-part Kick cycle in rapid succession, a sprawling, shape-shifting body of work that swung from club-ready reggaeton to chamber strings within a single sequence. Now based in Barcelona, she remains as prolific behind the boards for other artists as she is unpredictable on her own records.