Runtime slightly more manageable than when we last covered her…

[Video]
[5.43]

Alfred Soto: Two less terrifying names in the credits I couldn’t imagine. While fine as a handler of other people’s beats, Arca suffers the producer’s curse of being marooned when context-free. Sia, though — is she trying to outsing Bjork? Herself?
[3]

Tim de Reuse: The joys of Arca’s production style — the way it oozes, contorts, defies the kick/snare/hat trinity in favor of unclassifiable sound-objects pulsing away in the shadows — lend themselves particularly well to her own voice, which is often unpredictable and unsteady in the same way. It does not mesh nearly as well with Sia’s emphatic, straightforward delivery, here front-and-center in the mix and minimally processed, serving as a textural brick wall that the rest of the song simply does not know what to do with. When Arca brings out the four-on-the-floor kicks halfway through and the instrumental gets noisy enough to match the sheer power in Sia’s voice, things finally click together, if only for a brief moment.
[6]

Leah Isobel: The collision of Sia’s leaked vocal and the surreal, metallic instrumental Arca constructs around it has the energy of a Kingdom Hearts opening. It suggests an identity collapse, or mercury passing through a sieve. And yet, “Born Yesterday” settles to merely suggest. Arca approaches the structure and tone of the original vocal with a strange reverence: choruses and verses in the same place, pitch and tempo untouched, radio catharsis left intact in a way that doesn’t mesh with the atmosphere. The result feels underwhelming to me. Arca can go further than this, even on more pop-forward material; it’s fun to imagine her as a Top 40 producer, but you get the sense that she’s holding back.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Arca’s tensed, skinny synths saving above Sia’s keening, filtered voice is tense, so tense the piling synths fritz and freak, until they disappear, then reappear with a vengeance, slowly beginning to lower onto SIA, AND THEN THE DRUMS PUNCH THROUGH THE SHEET, their knuckles tipped with spikes of fuzzy synths, getting lower and closer every minute, the whole music box beginning to crackle and shiver until it zaps out of existence.
[6]

Will Adams: I do enjoy the concept of taking an EDM-pop song and running it through a paper shredder. Sia’s in her inspiro-drivel mode — “mistakes are part of life!” — but the contrast with Arca’s skittering arrangement works surprisingly well. Still holding out hope for a big, dumb future bass remix by, like, Slander or Jason Ross.
[7]

Alex Clifton: This isn’t bad, but the production distracts rather than adds anything to the piece. Mostly I feel like I’m constantly being attacked by a swarm of flying wasps who go invisible for thirty seconds and then decide to return for their revenge; unfortunately that means that it’s difficult to focus on anything else.
[5]

Samson Savill de Jong: The song constantly feels like it’s building to something that never really arrives. It doesn’t leave me wanting more so much as wanting something else.
[5]