The title suggests what this album is about, the opener “Dead” underlines it with cool beats: THE BPM celebrates the beat as a source of strength and power. Sudan Archives, real name Brittney Parks, began as a self-taught violinist and songwriter who confronted her instrument with electronic structures.
Editorial recommendations
While ATHENA (2019) unfolded mythical self-stagings that seemed Afrocentric and artificial at the same time, and NATURAL BROWN PROM QUEEN (2022) negotiated coming-of-age narratives, THE BPM looks towards a brilliant future. With the character Gadget Girl, visually formulated in the video for “My Type”, Parks stages an artist who designs autonomy as technologically encoded self-empowerment. And just as she sits on all kinds of strange equipment in this video, she moves through music that can easily be associated with this album.
Because even if we still hear the violin, of course, the deconstructions from house, from techno, from future R’n’B are what give this album its sound. Sometimes, for example in “A Bug’s Live”, they take the listener into the night, into the clubs of Detroit and Chicago. And sometimes, as in the beautifully shot “A Computer Love”, you think you can hear the hearts of the machines: their racing, their hesitation, their feeling – their BPM.
This review first appeared in Musikexpress 11/2025.