Sudan Archives named her first album after a Greek goddess, her second after a prom queen. Yet no swaggering persona has ever concealed the doubt that courses underneath her music. The 31-year-old violinist deals in cracked braggadocio and hidden insecurity. “I’m not average,” Sudan declared on her 2022 breakout Natural Brown Prom Queen, not that anyone would accuse a self-taught fiddler who brought an unfettered sensibility to pop’s hip outskirts of mediocrity.
Her third full-length, The BPM, pits her vulnerable heart against her ambition. Boasts are in bountiful supply: “I got a big bankroll/Yeah, money is my mascot,” Sudan gloats on one track. Meanwhile, each post-house beat builds with melancholy until it threatens to end the party. On “Los Cinci,” which briefly slows The BPM to a contemplative pace, Sudan sings, “Sometimes I can get real low but I am high right now.” Such whiplash mirrors The BPM at large: Sudan’s production, full of four-on-the-floor kicks and ticker tape hi-hats, broadcasts sadness long before she makes verbal note of it.
Anyone who has spent the wee hours at a club awash in house and techno knows that a gridded thump can breed ennui as easily as euphoria. Sudan’s beats and lyrics are mutually tense: The album explores a nonstop lifestyle, but anxiously—the thrills of being a bad bitch tainted by yearning and unease. “Ketamine and LSD complements my body,” Sudan sings in a full-bodied falsetto on “Touch Me,” and then follows with a shaky “I believe.” The excellent “A Bug’s Life” describes a love interest who “can never look back and she can’t go home.” Sudan’s matter-of-fact tone is affectionate at first, but with repetition, she sounds burdened, as wails worthy of Frankie Knuckles drive the point home. The characters in these songs confuse breathlessness for satisfaction, then wink at their own mistakes.
The technology Sudan uses is scrappy, not cutting-edge—she employs a vintage toolkit of a Roland SP-404 and DAWs emulating the drum machines that defined 1980s Chicago house and ’90s Detroit techno. Collaborators include her twin sister, her cousins, and several friends from the Midwest. For all of its post-human imagination—Sudan’s alter ego this time is “Gadget Girl,” a tech-augmented avatar—The BPM reaches deep into personal and cultural histories. Every few seconds, Sudan and her intimate cadre of producers jolt us from a 3 a.m. hypnosis with some acoustic or makeshift percussion over pounding kicks, a verse sliced with a breakbeat, or wordless, chopped-up backing vocals. The result is far more in touch with its feelings than its debaucherous veneer might suggest.
In the three years since her last album, Sudan broke up with a long-time partner. Having left behind both their shared house and the incense-scented bedroom atmospheres of her earlier oeuvre, Sudan reclaims herself and dance music’s confessional potential, merging Great Lakes hominess and booming arrangements that push toward the red. With the opening “Dead” and aching closer “Heaven Knows,” this is a breakup record that bleeds into the rebound period, smuggling liminality and angst inside a collection of bangers.
If The BPM sounds like the sort of album that might actually win over the mainstream, it’s also Sudan’s grittiest release, less pristine than the widescreen Natural Brown Prom Queen. And if that opus was sun-drenched, this is a wintry mix—all the more for its lyrical fantasies of fleeing to Costa Rica and Dubai. The bass is tectonic, the juxtapositions between short-lived melodies stark. Sudan’s violin parts are as rousing as ever, given breadth and texture by members of the Chicago string quartet D-Composed.
Yet she often tucks these accompaniments into the bridges, intros, and outros of songs, meaning they don’t provide the reckless release that they did in the past. Even an unexpected Irish jig in the center of “She’s Got Pain” only fuels The BPM’s pummelling energy, and later, “Ms. Pac Man” and the showstopping “Noire,” pull us into danker terrain. This dense, claustrophobic album is discomfitingly of the moment: Sudan’s characters sprint through these songs as though movement is a survival tactic, a way to push forward as the world presses down harder than ever.
