Album Review: The BPM by Sudan Archives
Sudan Archives has done it again with her third album. The strengths—muscle‑building loops, hybrid production, and a cohesive narrative of self‑transformation—make The BPM a standout release.
From the opening layout of “Dead,” Sudan Archives enters her third album with a split self-confession. “Tell me, can you tell me where my body goes?” she asks in a tone that feels more like a prayer than a question. She is singing about clothes that don’t fit, gloves that have lost their purpose, and red hair she can’t place—little details that read like she is rifling through a closet of identities. Then she poses the couplet that becomes the album’s calling card: “Where my old self at?…Where my new self at?” This is delivered through overlapping vocal layers —an intimate chorus of the same woman answering herself —and it sets a template for The BPM: a record in which Brittney Parks bends violin, electronics, and voice to build a futuristic manifesto of self‑possession, pleasure, and Black womanhood. She isn’t asking for her old self back; she is constructing a new one in real time.
Parks, who performs as Sudan Archives, has always been a hybrid. Born in Cincinnati to a father from Chicago and a mother from Detroit, she grew up between the cities that birthed house and techno—her stage name honors Sudanese fiddle music, and her early work fused folk violin with R&B. On The BPM, she wanted faster songs that could make her sweat on stage: she set her drum machines to 120 beats per minute and built tracks around that kinetic core. She embraced technology through a persona she calls Gadget Girl, leaning into Auto‑Tune and pitched‑down vocals—a quartet from the Chicago‑based collective D‑Composed reinforced strings. The album’s pulse is thus mechanical and organic—house pianos and baile‑funk drums pushing against bowed harmonics and handclaps. In these collisions, Parks finds a way to move her body without leaving it behind.
On “Come and Find You,” she reframes seduction as a power exchange. At first, her voice floats above a house groove, painting a scene of a lover moving through Los Angeles’ freeways and signal cables. With“Wires and roads, wire and roads” and “Up and down he go, up and down he goes” carry the vocabulary of circuits and traffic—she imagines connection as something wired rather than fated. The beat doubles down when her taunt becomes an insistence: “Come and find you, come and get it/I’m the finest, yeah I said it.” She is directing desire, commanding her partner to enter her orbit or be left behind. The production layers clipped hand drums over a rubbery bassline that nods to Detroit techno, giving the track a nervous, arousing energy.
That tension between allure and autonomy continues on “Yea Yea Yea.” Parks drops her voice to a husky growl and struts through the chorus with a simple chant—“Yea, yea, yea”—while telling the story of a flirtation on the dance floor. The details are tactile: she licks her lips, flips her hair, and rolls a joint; later, she brags about being “sweet as honey and…fly” and declares she can “turn a straight nigga bi.” It’s cheeky and brash, but the real power lies in her phrasing. Her lines tumble out like freestyle bars, punctuated by swoops of violin that mimic the flick of her hair.
“A Bug’s Life” expands the hustler narrative. The heroine here is a scammer who “hit a scam over 90 bands,” has “brand new tits…but they grew her ass,” and doesn’t need a man or a plan. The chorus—“‘Cause she never looks back/And she can’t go home”—loops like a mantra of forward momentum. The track’s pounding piano and four‑on‑the‑floor kick evoke early Chicago house, but the story is more cinematic: a woman building an empire from the wreckage of expectation, scamming not because she’s a villain but because she refuses to be contained. Even when karma reappears as a “mistress” who collects interest, the protagonist remains relentless. Parks’ vocal becomes a chorus of sirens, calling out from different angles, and the instrumentation flips between house stomp and syncopated funk, heightening the unpredictable routine she describes.
On “The Nature of Power,” the imagery turns pastoral: “Lovers and flowers/Birds and the bees/Wind and the trees/The nature of power.” Yet this idyll is a stage for risk. Over stuttering percussion, she urges her partner to “fuck the odds, bet it all on the two of us.” Later, she insists, “Pick your poison or preference or whoever”, collapsing choices into a single act of commitment. She describes finding her lover in Dayton, Ohio—an Adam and Eve revisiting Eden and slaying their idols. The track features a guest verse from rapper James, who boasts that he “swallowed my pride and I threw it up” and measures respect and power by how aroused it makes him. The connection between Parks’ airy hook and his gritty confession emphasizes her philosophy: power isn’t static; it grows like a seed, requiring softness and grit.
Parks’ fascination with technology surfaces most explicitly on “A Computer Love.” She opens by rejecting traditional rites—“I don’t wanna wait for wedding rings, that shit is overrated”—and claims the autonomy to decide when and how to connect. The hook insists she can be anything her partner needs, but then she asks, “Can you see past machines?” It’s a question not about hardware but about perception: can a lover recognize the humanity beneath Auto‑Tune? In the third verse, she rejects the idea of digitized affection outright—“All that I know is that I don’t want this computer love”—but then quickly complicates it by asking whether her partner’s eyes and skin are computerized. The song’s production mirrors this ambivalence. Glitchy synth arpeggios flicker like error messages, while layered vocals swell into a gospel‑like chorus. The repeated request to see past machines becomes an appeal for intimacy that can survive surveillance. As Parks told WBEZ, she created the album by simply opening her computer, setting the tempo, and layering drums. This self‑taught approach means technology isn’t an abstraction to her, but a tool she handles with familiarity.
“My Type” and “She’s Got Pain” explore mirrored selves. In the former, she details a woman who buys a loft in Compton, moves to Spain, and rides down Slauson in “blue‑brown jeans.” The verses are built on little portraits: Blossom owns a boat so her folks can enjoy the scene and wants both fame and a backstroke across the sea. The beat combines hand claps with a warped bassline that nods to baile funk, giving the song a rough, syncopated swagger. Parks raps through desires that range from passports to website design, making the track feel like a hustler’s vision board. “She’s Got Pain,” by contrast, is bathed in glowing synth pads and her signature violin. The hook warns that “If you take a bite you might feel it right, babe/Tied up for the night, hit the lights, we glow up.” She likens sex to an interactive marionette, acknowledging both pleasure and manipulation. It’s circuit training—a way of rehearsing ductility through each loop.
On “David & Goliath,” biblical imagery becomes personal scripture. Parks sings, “If only your heart could see/If only your soul could feel/The depths that I go through,” suggesting that her fight is as much internal as external. The chorus uses the simple line “I just wanna look nice / So I had to rewind”, equating self‑presentation with survival. In the second verse, she switches to rap, warning that she will travel to her lover even when they are out of sync. The bridge returns to the story’s namesake: she’ll aim her sling like David, aligning herself with the underdog who topples a giant. The track’s beat is one of the album’s most propulsive, a jerky rhythm that suggests footwork, and Parks’ violin screeches across it like a battle cry.
With the title track, she repeats “If I fly you to Costa Rica/Will you give me Pura Vida” over a squelchy bass and syncopated drums. The question is posed again and again in slightly different inflections, not as a mantra but like an athlete repeating a drill. The pre‑chorus finds Parks feeling a “super power,” boasting that her money is long like the Eiffel Tower and that “the rest are cowards, they choose to eat and we devour.” The chorus arrives as a chant—“The BPM is the power”—underlining her worldview: motion itself is liberation. The beat is built from house piano stabs, funk bass, and clipped hi‑hats; her pads in the background like a DJ scratching vinyl. When she sings, “If we ride out into the vision/Will our hearts follow the rhythm?” she shapes love as a question of tempo rather than destiny. In this context, loops aren’t static. They are exercises that build stamina, teaching both the artist and the listener to endure and to find control through repetition.
Humor and vulgarity take center stage on “Ms. Pac Man,” where she turns retro arcade imagery into erotic agency. She compares love to a maze and brags that she is a “crazy motherfucker” lighting up the joint. She needs a hood partner with a “plug on an emulator” and boasts, “Put it in my mouth, then my bank account/Fuck you on the couch in my favorite blouse.” The lyric is deliberately crass, flipping oral sex and financial power into the same transaction. The beat chugs like an 8‑bit synth on overdrive, and she uses simple rhymes to mimic the game’s repetitive mechanics. By the time she says “Watch the numbers scroll up,” it’s clear she is designing her own gameplay, one where pleasure and profit run parallel.
The most introspective moments come late. “Los Cinci” is a homecoming set to a glitchy soundscape. Parks returns to Cincinnati and finds the landscape transformed: “The trees and leaves and snow are all gone/The city streets are painted in gold.” Her mother is an empty‑nest vegan with no lover, and memories flood back to the passenger seat where an old flame once rode. She admits she can get “real low, but I am high right now”, capturing the disorientation of returning home after success. “Some things are never the same/Some things will always remain” repeats like a glitch—each pass highlighting a different word, each loop re‑anchoring her sense of self. Here, the BPM slows, but the internal pulse continues.
On “Noire,” she sings over a minimal club beat about a lover who puts his hands around her waist. “Don’t fight with it, this is not a threat/He said, ‘I’m just here to watch your back’.” The chorus’s refrain of “Dang, what happened?” is half lament, half exclamation, as if she cannot believe the intensity of the connection. The track plays like a negotiation between surrender and autonomy; its structure is deceptively simple, built around an uptempo dance track, simple bass notes, and handclaps, but Parks’ layered vocal harmonies turn it into a dancefloor hymn.
Finally, “Heaven Knows” begins by refracting faith through imperfection. She addresses a lover as a fallen angel and confesses that the sky is clearest when it pours. Later, she reassures them, “Regardless of what anyone thinks of you/I gotta speak up, I gotta reach for you.” The song’s tempo is slower, its melody reminiscent of gospel, yet the BPM remains the governing force. In the third verse, she declares that her dream world is her hometown and the real world is her playground, then promises that when everything falls down, she will be there. Rather than escaping the body, she finds transcendence by embracing contradictions: technology and tradition, violin and synthesizer, lover and fighter. It’s an ending that suggests beginning again.
The BPM is Sudan Archives’ most conceptually cohesive record yet. The self‑possession she began hinting at on Natural Brown Prom Queen is now fully embodied; she knows, as she told WBEZ, what she wants and how to work it. The album’s greatest strength is its sonic architecture. The violin remains Parks’ signature, but it no longer sits atop the beat; it’s woven into percussive patterns and often functions as the beat itself. The integration of D‑Composed gives tracks like “The Nature of Power” and “Heaven Knows” a lushness that never feels ornamental. Her forays into house, techno, and baile funk are not nostalgic exercises but explorations of diaspora rhythms; you can hear the Midwest’s influence, but also West African polyrhythms and Brazilian syncopation—the record pulses.
Parks’ slangy humor is part of her charm, but sometimes the wordplay feels tossed off. For instance, “I need a hood nigga with the plug on an emulator” is witty but shallow, and at times borders on certain tropes without much development. However, the album argues that the beat is the power—that movement is the path to liberation. Back when Parks asks on the title track if our hearts will follow the rhythm, she has already proven that hers will. The album is not perfect, but its hybrid logic—electro‑soul woven through house and funk, violin threaded through 808s—creates a world that feels entirely her own. It is a statement of futurist Black womanhood that doesn’t trade sensuality for seriousness or technology for warmth.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “David & Goliath,” “A Computer Love,” “The BPM”