“The BPM is the power,” Sudan Archives sings on the title track of her third studio album. Embodying “Gadget Girl,” a persona who empowers herself by making music through technology, Archives generates startlingly new sounds on The BPM. She covers a broad sonic range with her signature violin, treating the acoustic instrument like it’s electric throughout.
On the surface, The BPM is a relatively accessible dance album, and Archives is far from the first artist to treat the nightclub as home. But it also features some uncommonly harsh sounds: Buzzing noises fill up the album’s empty spaces (these songs are best consumed on headphones), giving the proceedings a hallucinatory edge.
The BPM finds excitement in disintegration, evoking a night out where druggy euphoria keeps threatening to morph into something more dangerous. Lyrically, “Yea Yea Yea” seems like a run-of-the-mill song about lusting after a man at a club, but sonically it feels alien, filled with spacey synths and the metallic drone of Auto-Tune. “A Computer Love” follows Archives’s glitchy falsetto down a rabbit hole of clattering, malfunctioning noise, while album closer “Heaven Knows” is punctuated by the sound of swords.
Even at The BPM’s most straightforward, such as the Latin-infused “Come and Find You,” the rhythms are varied and ever-shifting from track to track. “David & Goliath” draws on drum ‘n’ bass, while “A Bug’s Life” pulls from house music, leaning into dance as a release and reprieve: “She never looks back/And she can’t go home.”
Archives’s violin is embedded subtly and in unexpected ways on tracks like the brief “Los Cinci” and “Noire,” where it’s employed in an almost percussive way. Throughout the album, both the singer and the music itself are constantly on edge, and yet The BPM pulses with the kind of euphoria that can only come from letting loose on the dance floor.
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