Sudan Archives is plugged in to the future

Her sunny Los Angeles loft is filled with greenery, including a Japanese Bonsai tree, a sweet potato growing in water, and some vines she’s trying to get to wrap around her spiral staircase. She picked up all these tricks from YouTube, she says, and there are plenty more besides. Indoor gardening is just one of many projects, along with making yarn braids meant to look like locs, that keeps Parks busy in her endless quest to learn.

The abundance of nature in her apartment strikes me as quite a contrast to the electronic world of THE BPM. Out today through Stones Throw Records, Parks' third album as Sudan Archives is a feast of Jersey club, techno, dance-pop, and house that’s as gritty and as grungy as she has ever gone before, pushing her gear to the limit and delivering a dexterous result.

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Where the two previous albums showed off her skills as a classically trained violinist as well as a commitment to momentum and groove, THE BPM goes a lot further. Here, she steps into the role of Gadget Girl who, over the course of the record, dies, meets her younger self, becomes corrupted, drowns herself, then shrugs it off like nothing ever happened. It makes for the most electrifying collection of Sudan Archives songs yet, sort of like if Janelle Monáe’s The ArchAndroid was remixed and rebirthed. It’s high futurism mixed with a wildly imaginative concept that elevates Parks to an electronic disruptor on par with people like Kelela, early M.I.A., or Robyn – artists whose visions are singular and clear.

Parks is pretty clear when I ask where Gadget Girl came from: she’s always been there. From tinkering in her bedroom with her keyboards and instruments until now, Sudan Archives has always been with her gear. “The reason why I do music is because of the gadgets I figured out how to incorporate,” she explains. “It’s not like I’m this Whitney Houston singer, or prestigious violinist… It’s because I’m Gadget Girl.”

While Parks' music has always incorporated electronic elements, THE BPM pushes those elements to new, ear-splitting levels of distortion, from the noisy outro of “NOIRE” and the headbusting end to “YEA YEA YEA” to the groovy techno of “THE NATURE OF POWER”. “I knew I wanted to be disruptive, and to shake things up a bit,” she says.

THE BPM is technically a concept album, as Gadget Girl, once helmed by her instruments, gets corrupted and understands their danger, eventually emerging to the most natural endpoint to the human experiment on “HEAVEN KNOWS” – procreation. “I need to make a comic book for the album to describe the whole story,” she says. But the record, with all its eccentricities and Parks’ ever-present personality, is just as enjoyable as a slice of future-pop with its wide-ranging influences and often beguiling production style.

Genre-switchers like the hypnotic “COME AND FIND YOU” or the danceable “MY TYPE” plow past any bewilderment with their overload. It can be a lot – any Sudan Archives record is chock-full of whimsy and depth smashed together – but the overstimulation makes for one of the best pop albums of the year. And, crucially, the clearest follow-through of Parks’ vision thus far.

When I ask what she learned about herself after taking the helm of executive producer, she says, “No means no.” Working with many others can dilute the pool of options, and, after two records, she’s learned to trust herself. “It’s not about what other people want,” she says, “it’s about what you see.”

But THE BPM wasn’t made in isolation. The opposite, in fact, as it was created partially in Chicago and Detroit, with the help of her sister, touring band, cousin, and the Chicago-based Black music collective D-Composed, who worked with Parks on the strings. It’s with this wide-ranging group that little details come through in the songs, like the humour in “MS. PAC MAN” or the “early 2000s Waka Flocka beat” she asked her cousin to make for “YEA YEA YEA”. But at the centre of it all is Parks, calling the shots, strumming her violin, and remaining true to her vision.

Thematically, the songs are split between ones that explore a bodily groundedness and a fantastical, sci-fi life: sex meets machine in “COME AND FIND YOU”, “MY TYPE” is about lifting up her friends (“Sometimes I’m like, ‘Am I gay, or do I just love to empower women?’”), while “LOS CINCI” is an earnest ode to her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, lamenting all that has disappeared since her childhood, including a mall she once worked at. “There’s nothing there!” she says. The woman on the '90s house anthem “A BUG’S LIFE” is in the same lineage as hitmakers Crystal Waters and Cathy Dennis, complete with Parks’ wailing in the background. At its most agreeable, she’s rapping: “I’m tryna make vows and rule the world.”

But on places like “A COMPUTER LOVE”, Gadget Girl spirals as she wonders if her corporeal form is enough. “I can be everything you need me to be,” she pleads, “but can you look past machines?” Inspired by a trip to Costa Rica where Parks felt the weight of self-pressure, Gadget Girl’s drowning is intense in more ways than one. The title track boasts the slogan “The BPM is the power,” which means to follow your own “unique, inner DNA” on the human side, but for Gadget Girl, it’s a sign she’s become too egotistical, too high on her own motor oil.

At the record’s most conceptual, "THE NATURE OF POWER” sees Parks and rapper James McCall IV in the roles of Adam and Eve, mourning the destruction of the world around them. “Take what you need, leave what you can,” she urges, far too late.

Parks usually arranges the melody and McCall takes the lyrics, but on that song they were in-sync; both worked on their halves to make a finished product. “It was a beautiful collaboration, because we had no ego,” she says of working with her now ex-boyfriend, but in the aftermath of their break-up she’s left wondering who to share the achievement with now that the album’s out. “It’s the end of the chapter and I’m thinking about all of the things that happened in the past,” she says.

But if Parks can emulate her own album’s storyline, this is the part where Gadget Girl shakes off her corruption and depression and starts to work towards something worthwhile. If she purposefully drowned on “A COMPUTER LOVE”, trying to dislodge the tech from her system, she comes back to consciousness on the chic “NOIRE”, which could soundtrack a fashion show if it were held in a dark sewer. “Dang, what happened?” she asks over sinister piano plucks.

“She’s basically in sync with her partner now, because the Gadget Girl is wearing off,” Parks explains. “So she’s able to have a human connection with the partner and dance and rave all night.” And thus the storyline loops back around to “DEAD”, a rip-roaring electronic violin message from the past, where Gadget Girl tells her younger self she’ll be just fine.

If Parks can look to the future in her real life as much as she does in her music, which is quite a lot, the message is there, and THE BPM will unlock a whole new avenue of opportunities. Not that she needed anyone’s help anyway. But maybe future tripping’s not her style, since she sounds like the type to constantly be tinkering with new music, adding in new ideas until the last minute before the deadline. Asked what comes next now that the record is out there, her answer is grounded and practical. “I’ll only know when the chapter ends,” she says succinctly. “I’m present.”