When Francisca Cuello picks up a chainsaw in the dual video for “Ultra Terrorific Fantasy” and “Not ur mom,” the color of the blood dripping from her grinning mouth matches her bikini, like she’s performing in a hentaification of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The Argentine artist has built her Six Sex persona by weaponizing a hypersexuality that she has both gleefully embodied and had thrust upon her. In the second song, a fuzzy disco-gabber dream grounded by a melody that channels Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” she lays out the ethos for ULTRA, her debut album: “Lo que a mi me divierte seguro te va a asustar” (“What's fun for me will scare you for sure”). If the video—a Love Witch-esque psychosexual nightmare where Cuello compels mumbling perverts to chop their dicks off with machetes—is any indication, it’s obvious who should be afraid (and, more importantly, who’s having a great time).
ULTRA comes after five solid EPs that spanned reggaeton and ravepop, and pushes Six Sex’s obnoxious raunch levels to their breaking point. Co-produced by Six Sex, these tracks bounce everywhere from deconstructed dembow and electroclash to nursery rhymes and trap. The record’s throughline isn’t sonic cohesiveness, but the way each type of club music presented here embodies the album’s title: extreme, fervent, beyond. “BITCH UP” is a cunty electroclash strut bolstered by a nasty Eurotrash bass that channels Make The Girl Dance. “FUchi!” melds indie sleaziness with singsong-y vocals and breaks-heavy production. The dark, hard techno bass of “LOVE ME HATE ME” explodes into a sweaty drop, while “TU AMIGO” takes us into minimalistic trap territory. There’s even a moment of sensitivity on “i don’t love u,” which comes after the woozy, pseudo-’90s R&B track “MY WET PUSSY.” Over exultant house production with a relentless bass, she wraps disappointment in hedonism: “You’re such an asshole/But I don’t care/I don’t love you/You don’t love me.” In embracing expansion rather than specialization, Six Sex has made an album with a song for every kind of party.
After starting her career at Argentine raves, Six Sex initially broke through with a particularly filthy strain of underground reggaeton. She’s since differentiated herself from similar neoperreo vixens by going in a more electronic direction, but she doesn’t abandon these roots entirely on ULTRA. The waist whining is as present as ever; you find it in the bounce of the “Bam Bam” riddim on “Caliente,” the nightmarish vocal distortions and minimalistic dembow rattle of “HUMO,” and, most prominently, on the sinister synth rumbling through perreopop single “Pantalom.”
ULTRA carries itself with a horny intelligence that’s become Six Sex’s calling card. Her political outspokenness and fearlessness in challenging the danger women face in flaunting their sexuality, particularly in her native Argentina, is one of her strengths, as is her ability to imagine a new world where that violence doesn’t exist. On “boyfree”, she uses the backdrop of Miami to reimagine the boats-and-hoes 305 of DJ Khaled as a champagne-fueled paradise for Latina baddies, no boys allowed. On the victorious final song “no more porn,” she kicks off the track with an Auto-Tuned proclamation of sexual autonomy: “My human body is not your fetish/My human body is my fetish.”
In pleasure, there can also exist profound terror: a fear of being too vulnerable, or that your fucked-up kink won't be accepted, even a fear of death. Six Sex never ignores the horrors, but uses them as fuel for a debut that unfurls as a freewheeling post-porno blitz. She acknowledges the cruel reality and speaks openly about the heaviness—and still puts on the lashes and putishorts, packs a joint in her pack of Virginia slims, and calls her Uber to the club. How else is one to survive if not by dancing?
