A boundary-breaking musician, producer, visual artist, and more, Alejandra Ghersi’s work as Arca defines the cutting edge of those fields. Her fluency in different media echoes how effortlessly her music borrowed from various genres while defying easy classification: the rumbling, rattling percussion that became a hallmark of her style had roots in hip-hop, noise, IDM, and Venezuelan party music. Ghersi’s approach was distinctive enough to be immediately recognizable even when she produced music by artists as prominent as Kanye West, Björk, and Frank Ocean. Arca’s own music was even more adventurous, whether she subverted the sounds of hip-hop in unapologetically queer ways on her early EPs or skillfully balanced her experimental and emotional sides on her first full-length, 2014’s Xen. Ghersi reinvented herself with each album, emphasizing the density and volatility of her music on 2015’s Mutant and breaking it wide open with the outpourings of 2017’s Arca, her first work to feature her voice. With the five-album Kick project that spanned 2020 and 2021, she reassembled pop into new, complex yet intuitive forms.