On Sudan Archives’ first album, 2019’s Athena, Cincinnati-born, Los Angeles–based Brittney Parks appears on the cover like a lost sculpture from antiquity, nude, cast in bronze, and holding a violin—her signature instrument—aloft. Across the record, she explored a range of alter egos, from the Sudan Archives of her stage name (a nod to her fascination with ethnomusicology) to the Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare referenced in the album’s title and the “Black Vivaldi” figure that appears on the song of the same title. On her follow-up, 2022’s thrilling Natural Brown Prom Queen, Parks transformed into another alter ego: Britt, whom she described as “the girl next door from Cincinnati who drives around the city with the top down and shows up to high school prom in a pink furry bikini with her thong hanging out her denim skirt.” (To wit, Parks appeared on the cover of that album in nipple pasties and a long crushed velvet skirt, her hot pink braids trailing behind her.)
And on her dazzling third album, The BPM (announced today and releasing on October 17), Parks has another figure she’s embodying: Gadget Girl. Who is she, exactly? “Gadget Girl represents being self-made and self-contained and utilizing the things and tools around you to just be the best version of yourself, rather than depending on other people,” Parks tells me from her studio in LA, where an array of stringed instruments hang on the wall behind her. “There’s this hyper-independence to it, but it’s also a journey of self-exploration. Plus, I’ve always been a tech girl, and I just think it will look really cool onstage to have all the wires exposed to show what happens behind the scenes of the music. My music has always been basically made with a lot of technology, a lot of little robots.”
The album begins with “Dead,” an exhilarating roller-coaster ride of a lead single, which features Parks crooning “Did you miss me?” over swooping chords played by a string quartet before pummeling, four-to-the-floor beats and a whir of chopped-up vocals that sound almost like a siren come in—and things don’t let up from there. The title hints at the direction she’s heading in this time around: taking her distinctive sonic cocktail of neo-soul, R&B, and electronica and channeling it into 15 tracks of genre-defying experimental dance music.
Even by Parks’s already impressive standards, it’s an extraordinary record. Where at moments Natural Brown Prom Queen felt like it was flexing to showcase the sheer versatility of her talents, on The BPM her sprawling fascination with music history and maximalist instincts are still present but feel laser focused—and firmly trained on the dance floor. “I feel like I’ve got all my personalities in this album still, but it just feels a lot stronger,” she says.
So how is she feeling as she prepares to unveil this new chapter to the world? “I’m not nervous,” Parks says, after a pause. “I always have a bit of anxiety, but that’s normal. I’m just ready to go.”
Part of the reason for Parks’s excitement is that the album is very much a family affair. She explains that over the course of making it, she found herself reconnecting with her family’s heritage—her mom is from Detroit and her dad from Chicago—and the rich threads of dance music that are woven through the histories of both cities. “I feel like my beats have always sounded a bit like where my parents are from, but this time it had this more experimental vibe to it, and I was very intentional about the fact that I wanted to make a dance record,” Parks says.
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There’s also the fact that—unlike with Natural Brown Prom Queen, which featured an eclectic roster of collaborators—Parks worked solely with her sister, a cousin from Detroit, and one of her best friends on the songwriting and production for The BPM, allowing her to express herself in ways she hadn’t previously felt able to. “When you’re around your family and when you’re having a good time, that’s a special energy I wouldn’t be able to re-create on my own in LA,” she says. “I just got high off of that energy.” Those intimate relationships encouraged her to head into new, previously unexplored lyrical territory, spanning mental illness, heartbreak, and the euphoric joy of letting it all go in the club. “It was way more organic, and it ended up bringing out all these personalities and characters that would only otherwise come out if I was lit at a club with my cousin,” Parks adds, with a laugh.
It’s a spirit that is palpable on the second single, “My Type,” released today. In it, she reels through a rogues’ gallery of bold women in her life she admires (“She steady flossin’, she bought a loft then / She moved to Compton, then moved to Spain,” Parks raps over icy synths and a finger-snapping beat), with a delicious ambiguity around whether her affections are merely friendly or based in a carnal desire. Oh, and it comes accompanied by a delightfully bonkers video in which Parks sits at a desk in front of various pieces of computer equipment “coding the perfect me,” before appearing as a series of cyber avatars in a futuristic industrial space.
That sci-fi aesthetic also crops up on the album cover, where cables sprout from her back, as well as on songs like “A Computer Love” and “Ms. Pac Man”; ever since watching Minority Report as a kid, Parks has been a sci-fi obsessive. “My life is like a sci-fi—I really feel like that sometimes,” she says. “Everything I do is just, like, I’m trying to figure out how to make some gear compatible with something that I want to do with the music.”
That tech aesthetic is visible in Parks’s playful fashion this time around, too, which she created in collaboration with her stylist, Justus Steele. “The Gadget Girl outfit that we already designed together has all these weird wires coming out—it’s like a second-skin nude suit,” she says. “And there’s a lot of up-and-coming designers we’ve discovered through Instagram that we’re working with.” (Just last week, “Dead” also soundtracked the finale of the Chanel haute couture show; it’s unlikely to be the last time Parks will appear at Fashion Week before this album cycle is over.)
Still, Parks has described herself as more of a “studio rat” than someone who lives for performing and touring. Given the club-ready sound of The BPM, does she feel any differently this time around? It’s hard, after all, not to listen to it and immediately picture the songs going crazy live.
“Well, I’m excited because the studio-rat aesthetic is coming with me!” Parks says, grinning. “I like to be in the studio because I’m around all my gear. I feel like I can make music whenever I want and mess and experiment. But the stage design will look like me in my studio.” After recent tours supporting the likes of Caroline Polachek and André 3000 (it comes as little surprise that the latter is a fully paid-up Sudan Archives fan), Parks feels more confident in her abilities as a performer than ever before. She also announced a UK and Europe tour in the fall today, with US dates also on the horizon.
Talking to Parks, it’s clear she’s raring to go—ready to hit the road and get the party started. “I can see myself touring with this album for a while, because I think maybe after this I’m going to do something more, like, orchestral,” she says. “So, yeah, I’m just ready to turn up—and get a workout.”
