Sudan Archives Is Pushing the Tempo

Brittney Parks is a bundle of energy in jeans, brown boots, and an extra-watt smile. It’s a drizzly September day in Manhattan, and the gray humidity streams through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Whitney Museum, making its white halls feel even more hermetically sealed. We ride a massive elevator to the top floor for the main exhibit: Christine Sun Kim’s All Day All Night, in which the California artist interprets sound and music into American Sign Language and other “non-auditory, political dimensions of sound,” per the Whitney's description. The exhibit is filled with drawings and sculptures that re-envision musical notation from the artist’s deaf perspective—staffs that stop midway and branch off, notes that dip and bend. Parks, who makes music as Sudan Archives, is a self-taught violinist, vocalist, producer, and songwriter. She swerves around genre conventions with irreverence; her talent, confidence, and directness are what make it work. I wondered if there would be a kind of parity between the way Kim views sound and Sudan views music: as a construct with so-called rules to upend. 

“I like how she's bringing us into her world, and I want people to feel like this [at my shows],” Parks observes, and points to a series of Kim’s graph drawings. “I want people out there dancing. I want to dance. I want to move. I just turned 31—I'm trying to get out all the jitters, so I knew that I wanted the BPM to be faster.” 

She’s in town to promote her third album, The BPM, on which she explores and expands on the origins of dance music in Black Detroit and Chicago with a punk approach to form. Her finely tuned ear for mashing hip-hop, R&B, and violin solos into an avant-pop melange has rightly made her an underground hero. The BPM is a gleaming accomplishment, a document of self-actualization and musical fortitude that shatters the conventions of house, club, hyperpop, and melodic trap, and pieces them together again. For a violinist who already shreds, she’s going even harder on the melodies to match the drive of the beats. “I'm shredding because I'm trying to be like Jimi Hendrix,” she says. 

The self-assuredness of the music is astounding, even for a musician known for her self-assuredness. But Parks also had an ulterior motive for making a dance album: working off her anxiety. “I feel like I’m a race car, energetically,” she explains. “So I was like, let me give myself something to work out to. I wanted to give myself a challenge, and that's making fast music and figuring out how to perform it for an hour and a half.”

We’re halfway through the exhibit when Parks informs me that she took ASL as her language elective in high school, and she was so good at it that her teacher encouraged her to continue on the college track. “She said my facial expressions were the best, but I knew I was gonna do music somehow,” she says, before stopping dead in her tracks in front of a video that depicts Kim translating sound to a painting. “Whoa,” she says, with a quiet awe, as a keyboard triggers a paintbrush on a canvas, music literally translated into visual art.

Parks’s admiration for Kim’s ingenuity reflects an ingeniousness of her own. For The BPM, she conjured an alter ego called Gadget Girl to explore her interest in science fiction and a desire to demystify her process. The Gadget Girl concept is both a metaphorical vessel, a way to cloak ideas and emotions in the imaginary, and a literal one—she intends to put her musical tools front and center. “We're always hiding the gadgets—when you’re performing, you kind of have your [gear] to the side,” she explains. “But I was like, let's just bring everything to the forefront—expose anything. I realized that I was singing about things like, ‘I want to rewind time. I want to go back to this moment.’ It’s very sci-fi. I would use this AI voice to describe what love is.” 

Time is a center of yearning on The BPM: she wishes to rewind it in a melodic minor-key rap on “Yea Yea Yea,” but also clutches it jealously over Jersey club, imagines traveling through it over a crunch of hyperpop, and contemplates it with urgency over drum machine clamor. While Parks adopted personas for 2022’s Natural Brown Prom Queen and 2019’s Athena, those were earthbound characters, extensions of herself; Gadget Girl presents like armor for the real Parks who, safely tucked inside, navigates her own emotional landscape. 

She wrote The BPM during a stalemate in her former relationship, in which she wondered why, after five years and watching her friends marry and have children, they weren’t progressing in kind. After the album was finished, she planned a show in the Grand Cayman Islands and brought out her cousin, whose partner proposed while they were there. “Stuff like that was happening, and I was just acting out,” she says, “and I was already acting out before then. I was comparing myself to others, and I was slowly breaking down. I was like uhp! Malfunction! And that’s how Gadget Girl started,” Parks laughs. 

On “Computer Love,” Parks sings sweetly on a coil of synths that sound like champagne glasses being played and then smashed to pieces. “That’s the malfunctioning of Gadget Girl,” she explains. “But in the song, she says, ‘I don't want to wait for wedding rings, that shit is overrated.’ It's me talking about how I kinda wanna be married, but it’s not happening.” Gadget Girl, Parks says, acts as both construct and conscience, “kinda like an extra voice in your head.” 

Working alone as Gadget Girl is also a respite from what she refers to as the trauma of finishing the album. She collaborated, she said, with family and friends, renting out a studio house in Detroit, with her cohorts making beats in the basement while she tracked vocals upstairs. It was “very fun and playful—my dog was there,” she said. But over time, until, negotiating monetary percentages for her family members’ work turned out to be difficult, with conflict between her desire to pay what people thought they deserved and her management countering with what they thought was fair. In the end, she gave everyone what they wanted, but is looking to future collaboration with a wizened eye. “Mixing business and pleasure is really hard,” she says. “This has been the biggest learning experience, because at the end of the day, this is your baby, and you're like, giving away parts of you. But the music has to grow from dirt to be a flower. ” 

It’s all worked out now, she shrugs. At least she learned to better communicate upfront. “It's like a newly found joy,” she says. “The old me is dead, and now the new me is, like, sprouting.”

We make our way back down to the café at the Whitney, where we’re glided to a sprawling booth under the overcast sun. I ask Parks about one of my favorite songs on The BPM, “Ms. Pac Man,” a trunk-thumping hip-hop track on which her playful melodic delivery reminds me of early art-punks like The Slits or X-Ray Spex. She explains that, during recording, her cousin Taylor was drunk and complained that all Parks ever sings about is love, before yelling the mantra that would become the song’s chorus: “Put it in my mouth! Put it in my mouth!” 

“I love that she did that because, for example, the label that I'm signed to, Stones Throw, they're like J Dilla and Madlib fans—very male-centric kind of vibe, right?,” she says. “So when I posted that song, it created a lot of feedback in a negative way. But I love it, because sometimes I feel like people look at me and they’re like, ‘Wow, she’s so profound.’ It’s like, yeah, thanks. But also, I’m lit. I can be stupid if I want to be. I’m not your magic little violin player.” 

Besides, she continues, her family’s from Detroit, and knew Dilla personally. “They babysitting him,” she says. “My aunt was in a choir with his mom. I’m closer to that shit than you guys will ever be. So sit down and keep watching me and commenting and saying negative shit and blowin up my shit.” Parks cackles and scrunches up her face, imitating an uptight white man commenting on her Instagram page: “This isn’t Stones Throw! RAWR! White people telling us what to do again, like actually: No. This is hip-hop, because it’s me.”

Parks is naturally hilarious when delivering this bromide, but the truth behind it is that she’s used to countering expectations of her, simply because of who she is. “In violin culture, they're like, ‘Oh, she’s not playing violin good enough.’ Or some people are like, ‘She’s rapping now, this is so ghetto.’ It's like, Y’all, I do a lot of shit. I can’t be just one thing.”

It’s true, though, that she is rare in her profession as a rapping, singing, songwriting, producing violinist. So when she discovered the Kentucky rapper/producer/violinist Cain Culto on Instagram, she immediately messaged him. Their conversation resulted in her guest spot on his track “KFC Santería,” unequivocally the song of summer 2025, and made Parks think about her own musical approach. She had found a comrade. “Violinists that do their own music—because they were brought up in the classical world—always tell me ‘I feel like I'm stuck, I don’t know how to improv in the way I want,’ and it comes off a little dated sometimes,” Sudan says. “We end up just being in orchestras, and it’s really hard for them to think about how they can be their own entity. So when I saw Cain, I was like, ‘I actually fuck with this.’ And I wanted to show love, because it’s really hard to find your sound when you come from that.”

On Sudan’s “KFC Santería” verse, she raps, “Shakin’ booty, shakin’ butt, shakin’ ass women/ Call us sinners suckin’ blood ‘til the sun's risen/ Playin’ the fiddle under full moon blue light/ Got the band drinkin’ cornbread moonshine/ Cincinnati West African bloodline/ It’s the Black underground where my love lies.” Sudan thinks a lot about the history of the violin—the way it’s associated with white European classical music, the way the fiddle was integral to music of enslaved Africans in the U.S. She also cites the goji, a West African fiddle which she uses often in her music, and the way stringed fiddles are used in Sufi music. So when she saw Ryan Coogler’s epic Sinners, in which a group of white vampires attempt to steal the music of Black musicians in the Prohibition era-South, she connected its depiction of the fiddle as a celebratory instrument to her own.

“I was fucking with that movie, because it showed the Black roots of folklore and dance music. Back in the day, all the slaves and in all types of cultures, when they went to the party,  the violin was the center of dance music,” she says. “To me, it’s not about techno or what type of dance beats I’m doing. The violin is an instrument that used to bring the party. Even the white people in Sinners, they got their little jig they do. The violin is not a color. It’s just a vibe to bring people together.”