Sudan Archives has always been a champion of self-will and self-belief: A violinist who learned by ear and from YouTube, a gonzo pop star who works outside the mainstream, a deft creator of personal mythology who moved to Los Angeles from Cincinnati, Ohio, to make music that fuses her love of the violin and fiddle music with the contemporary Black underground, all in pursuit of what she calls Orchestral Black Dance Music. Brittney Parks embodies the idea that following your own muse is the surest route to artistic andpersonal fulfillment. On her third album, THE BPM, Parks embraces that idea fully. If her last two albums looked to the past – embodying both goddess and muse on 2019’s Athena, writing a punky coming-of-age tale for 2022’s Natural Brown Prom Queen – THE BPM imagines a dazzling, chrome-plated future in which we’re all tapped into our own sense of rhythm. As she sings on the album’s title track and thesis: “The BPM is the power.” “No one can take away your rhythm from you – no one can take away your self-will,” says Parks. The ideas she explores on the record all ultimately draw back to this one idea. “All those things can be your own power if you utilize them right.” To get to that place, Parks had to look back at her own history. THE BPM taps into her mother’s roots in Michigan and her father’s in Illinois; it was partially completed in Chicago and Detroit, embracing the club sounds from those cities while taking in everything from Jersey club to contemporary EDM and experimental beatwork. She decided to Executive Produce the album, so after working up demos, longtime collaborator and manager Ben Dickey produced the album with her, alongside co-production by Eric Terhune and James McCall IV, and using additional contributions from her twin sister, her touring band on NBPQ, her Detroit cousins, and friends they brought to sessions there. (The one exception was inviting Chicago-based Black chamber music collective D-Composed to put together a string quartet for the album's anthemic string parts.) After assembling a trusted team, Parks was free to experiment and dig deep into her psyche, knowing she could hand the reins to her collaborators if needed. THE BPM introduces a more clarified Parks – a writer, producer and performer moving with grace and confidence through her most fun, freewheeling record yet. “This album just feels really homemade,” she says. “It felt really wholesome to be able to have fun and use my family members’ lyrics and work together. We used to write songs together all the time when we were younger, we used to praise dance together in church… it was really cute to be able to do this now.” THE BPM features small, poignant connections to that sense of childhood freedom: “DEAD”, the album opener, plays like a message from Parks’ younger self to her current form. “Tell me, have you seen her?” she asks, “I just have to know.” The rest of the record answers that question, finding Parks undergoing an intense journey of self-discovery. Sudan Archives has always used personas to translate her energy on each album – on Athena, she was a classical goddess; on Natural Brown Prom Queen, she inhabited Britt, the gum-snapping Cincinnati girl with big dreams. On THE BPM she introduces a new persona: Gadget Girl, a technologically advanced musician who’s exalted by her embrace of technology. “I was never the girl in a band in high school – I could only express myself for the first time when I got my first iPad and started making beats on it, and when I got my first electric violin. I’m all gadget girled out now, but I’ve never felt so free as a human,” she says. That’s evident on songs like “MY TYPE,” which Parks describes as her first “rap rap song” – a cascading track about sexual liberation that also features some of her most outré production. “The song is kind of flirty and corny and sexy, because I’m hyping up my friends and also saying ‘These are the types of girls I like’,” she says. “It’s also hinting on sexuality – are these just friends, or women I’m in love with?”Romance is just one aspect of this album: THE BPM explores themes of mental illness, self-love, technology, romance and heartbreak even as it embraces a raucous, party-starting energy. On “A COMPUTER LOVE”, she explores the societal pressures, and expectations of marriage, that women face: “They keep asking me when will it be, this shit is complicated,” she sings, “I don’t wanna feel the pressure of the world.” Inspired by a trip with her ex-boyfriend and family when Parks began spiraling about where she was supposed to be in life, “A COMPUTER LOVE” is a maelstrom of intrusive thoughts and futurist noise. “I was like, everyone’s having babies, everyone’s getting married – what am I doing?” she recalls. Other songs, like “MS PAC MAN”, take the opposite tack, delighting in profanity and irreverence. “My cousin Taylor was like, all you write about is love, sometimes I want to be toxic – I want to hear stupid shit,” recalls Parks. “Eric, her husband, was playing this beat, and Taylor was like ‘PUT IT IN MY MOUTH’ and I was like, oh God, that’s so funny – ‘AND MY BANK ACCOUNT!’” That totally freeform sense of expression pervades THE BPM: “COME AND FIND YOU”, for example, was built around a loop made by one of Parks’ stylists Umesi, which she then turned into a beat in real time. Later, a friend from Amsterdam added drums; the resulting track is a sexy, effortless flirtation where Parks uses her elastic vocals to convey steadfast confidence. This approach speaks to Parks’ fully realized self- determination on THE BPM: sometimes, being fully in-tune with yourself means ceding space to others, understanding your limitations and knowing how to bring out the best in the people around you. For Parks, that meant taking a step back and letting herself work as director and conductor of the talented crew that was already around her, rather than treating Sudan Archives as an island. That, in turn, brought out the best in her, a gadget girl who’s taken yet another monumental step forward with THE BPM – the kind of leap you can only make when you trust your instincts, trust the people around you, and lock into your own rhythm.