Arca doubles down on the psychosexual thrust of her ‘KiCK’ series with a more “manic, violently euphoric and aggressively psychedelic” gush of queered reggaeton energies in its wild 3rd volume

Where the parallel release of KiCK ii’ was more locked to reggaeton’s 100bpm bracket, this one ramps the tempos and conceptual pressure with blazing sound design to delirious effect across another dozen belters that rinse the dembow template into fresh new dimensions, as shared by the likes of Paul Marmota, Debit and Lao from the NAAFi crew, and explored in more oblique and unique ways by likes of Ziúr and Aya.

In her own words “Electra Rex is a new archetype I propose in reference to commonly understood ideas of Freud regarding the oedipal complex—Oedipus Rex kills the father and unknowingly making love to the mother. Electra complex posits the binary opposite: killing the mother and unknowingly making love to the father. And so I am the first to propose a non-binary psychosexual narrative to avoid falling into the same generational tragic blind spots. Electra Rex, a merging of both names, an integration of both Oedipus Rex and Electra: it kills both parents and has sex with itself, and chooses to live”.

So yeh, it’s an album about fucking your dad and killing your ma. Take or leave that whichever way you need; the music utterly slays on its own merits, but certainly takes on a whole other, cyber-operatic, uchronic-mythical dimension in context that may take more than a few listens, and an ability to understand Spanish, to really grasp. On the most immediate level it’s an arresting experience, reeling form the rambunctious snarl and attack of ‘Bruja’ to the piquant hyperballad of ‘Joya’ via the recoiling technoid ferocity of ‘Incendio’ and the staggering futurism of ‘Electra Rex’, with thrilling sense of restraint and deviousness in ‘Rubberneck’.