This item is available for preorder. All items in your cart will ship on or around October 17, 2025. This date is subject to change due to reasons beyond our control, and you may receive this product after its official release date. If you would like to receive other items sooner, please place two separate orders.

On THE BPM, Sudan Archives – real name Brittney Parks – embodies the idea that following your own muse is the surest route to artistic and personal fulfilment. If her last two albums looked to the past – she was both goddess and muse on 2019’s Athena, and wrote 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.”

THE BPM looks to Sudan’s 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 global dance musics and experimental beatwork. The whole record is a family affair: Parks enlisted her sister, a cousin from Detroit and one of her best friends to assist, and exclusively worked with people she knew intimately for the first time, rather than bringing in producers from outside the fold.

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.

THE BPM explores themes of mental illness, self-love, technology, romance and heartbreak even as it embraces a raucous, party-starting energy. It also introduces a more clarified Sudan – an executive producer and artist moving with grace and gonzo confidence through her most fun, freewheeling record yet.

Release Date: Oct 17, 2025
Record Label: Stones Throw
Format + Color: 12" Double Vinyl

Tracklist:
DEAD
COME AND FIND YOU
YEA YEA YEA
TOUCH ME
A BUG’S LIFE
THE NATURE OF POWER
MY TYPE
SHE’S GOT PAIN
DAVID & GOLIATH
A COMPUTER LOVE
THE BPM
MS. PAC MAN
LOS CINCI
NOIRE
HEAVEN KNOWS

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