the best playlist made could only ever dream of this perfect setlist of raw, unbridled hits. it is memorably brittle, instantaneously catchy—and with plenty of insightful ramblings to give it just enough edge (and still, only if you feel like it; it's not required to love it), this is the one. there might be more complexity elsewhere, but it always swirls back here, a perfect balancing act of insanity over hidden pop structures.

breathtaking is a meaningless word. it never comes close to capturing that feeling when your heart plunges into a well, your brain swells inside your skull, your pupils dilate, and every bit of life in you stands cornered from something you have no ability to name, to contextualize, to get anywhere near reasoning with. "love me once again / if you dare," translated, is similarly pointless. i see the words, re-addressed to my mind, my understanding, but it comes only a fraction of the way to reaching the same outcome. whatever that kind of consumption is, in taking from Venezuelan folk tradition, reinterpreting, spitting back out and creating something this disgustingly powerful and transient—whatever it irks inside, that is the feeling that 'breathtaking' is trying painfully to grasp.

the disconnect of styles makes sense for a one-off non-album single, and a remake from a side project. they don't need to be the same, they don't need to make sense back to back. but her tenacity makes it stick together so well. some of the lyrics when read into are (justifiably) self-glorifying, but they take the time and space well to spell out why, to be lovely all the same, to give a proper backdrop to how it all makes sense. the fluttering melody and skipping drum patterns on Flash in the Pan, and the tremendous swells and fake-out of Dream Sequence are trademarks of her own, but she still manages to make it all sound brand new, to bring something new to the table. i don't think another artist is quite like her, and it shows here very well.

it might be hard to separate the fact these tracks never landed on a larger scale project, but they have plenty of heart each. the a-side / b-side metaphors as a cute flipping of what emotions they each floatily mention are the biggest draws, even if No Angel has Focus beat in its instrumental liveliness. still, it's a good detour, a needed addition after coming off the heels of Pop 2, and on the way to what came next. it was the one respite before plans crumbled just a little bit and her ambitions once again widened—though the more careful, measured arrangements here play to their strengths very well, and prove that tuning into everything she delivers is never a bad idea.

i went through Arca's to-date discography rather quickly. even returning to earlier works like Xen and Mutant after the fact cast each in a better light and offered a new glimpse into how she got to where she was when this released. because as much as her earlier works are difficult to parse simply by being marvels of sound design, this second album single after Time—and most of what's to be found in the KICK series—is more-so just incredibly overstimulating, a blistering assault that still gives ample room to be completely enamored by texture and the subtle quirks in its build. the latin pop, glitch, and industrial all-in-a-blender mix, paired with a maximally disorienting but wonderfully fitting music video, was the true off-the-wall start to an unprecedented set of albums.

the opposite of catatonic, overbearingly so. it is grimy and disgusting and horrifyingly vivid, and its overwhelming emotion is paralyzing. the instrumental machine-gun fire and searing vocals are so brittle, and it feels like the soul of it is wishing desperately to be excised forever. there is no other metal song that feels so painfully realized and caustically terrifying.