This is Sudan Archives’ allow-me-to-reintroduce myself era, a reappraisal after drastic personal overhaul, one that refuses to exploit upheaval for material. Sudan, whose birth name is Brittney Denise Parks, is one of the rare souls who remains real in the spotlight and behind the curtain, disarmingly authentic. Her resultant style, of both dress and music, is edging and transcendent, aloft and full of momentum. She is currently basking in a post-breakup glow mingled with the anchor that is her commitment to honest self-expression.
It’s surprising in the way it’s sometimes unexpected for an artist to return to herself at the exact moment she could have strayed into the wrong kind of reinvention, the wrong climb, for the wrong reasons — careerism, opportunism, fear of her own idiosyncrasies. Instead, Sudan has refined her innate originality in her forthcoming album “The BPM,” which was recorded mostly in Detroit and sounds as carefree and earnest as the new way of life she’s cultivating.
Sudan’s reinvention, in both her life and art, has found its depth in minimalism. She’s just moved into an open-concept loft with violins mounted on the main wall like tribal masks. A spiral staircase separating the living room from the kitchen leads up to the bedroom, arranged how a set designer might install a backstage for a performer in a show or documentary, just extravagant enough to indicate you’re in the territory of fantasy-building and an artist’s practical magic. Clothing and jewelry are the artwork upstairs; the way the instruments and recording equipment adorn the bottom floor with purpose and function, chic without trying too hard, is elevated without any air of elitism. The entire space is autobiographical and intimate in a way that would make the wrong visitor feel like an intruder and the wrong inhabitant an impostor. It is a real home.
Part of rebirth is the bittersweet mastery of warding off misaligned energy. After ending a years-long relationship with a man she might have married, and selling the home she’d shared with him, Sudan moved into a space that gets so much Los Angeles sunlight it makes it impossible for a tenant to hide from herself. Neither grief nor the sublime can be avoided when everything around you is yours. And you can sense her higher level of accountability and drive. The space demands this focus, it has its own diva-ism — fierce, vibrant, vulnerable in an almost confrontational way, and just as subdued when the curtains are drawn. These rooms sing with Californian lyricism, that casual L.A. bliss that the rest of the word criticizes, envies, misunderstands. An organic kale salad, the faint scent of sativa from days before, the blond best-friend puppies gallivanting as the light turns them golden before they all finally sit together on the anti-inflammatory PEMF mat that is supposed to calm the nervous system and recalibrate the blood. A modest slice of paradise, earned.
The first single on Sudan’s upcoming album, dropping this October, is called “Dead.” The looping refrain “hello, it’s me” haunts and hums scantily and seductively behind a manic pulsing beat and harrowing strings, until the final movement in the song punches rapid-fire as if knocking out an opponent with self-revelation. All of this is accomplished with a staggering of tones, an ecstatic beat backed by subtle melancholy that becomes a resolve in the song, though the single resists that facile air of having something to prove that makes many I’m back anthems mediocre. A hit, homegrown and singular yet universal.
When I arrive at Sudan’s new place for this interview and photo shoot, having heard the vision months earlier while sitting in her old house after a party, my heart applauds. Her team is there with wardrobe options for the video shoot for her next single. The summer solstice week heat is oppressive but the mood convivial in a West Coast casual way, with everyone acting like close friends and aloof strangers at the same time, as is habit in Los Angeles social life. Having tried on several statement pieces ahead of our arrival, Sudan is back in her streetwear, some baggy Adidas-esque track pants and a white tank with the word “dead” written on it in sardonic all-caps and kitten-heeled sandals, large-framed glasses, her dog dotingly in and out of her lap. We discuss the merits of living alone, and how it changes and expands the aura, but demands resilience and that you become your own best friend.
The new album shifts from the devotional undertones on her previous release, “Natural Brown Prom Queen” (2022), to openhearted lust and yearning for a good time, a reinstating of latent passions that were tempered by sentimentality and fidelity before. In a very literary sense, the opening track on the 2022 album is called “Home Maker,” and the singer declares herself one, and we feel invited into a tradition we’re all supposed to recognize: domestic life, wanting to be both kept and free. Whereas each track on “The BPM” is more emancipatory than the one that precedes it; home means something new, a deliberate renovation of received ideas of how to make a house a home. With “Dead” as portal, we enter a carefree, semi-disembodied afterlife on the dancefloor where not much matters but the beat and the matter-of-fact vocal jolting it into place. There’s a Kafka-esque moment about an anthropomorphized insect in the center of the album’s plot, and the final track promises ascension, Heaven even, the many mansions of a spiritual home.
As is common with a life reset, Sudan explains that she has also reset her closet, getting rid of things, narrowing down her clothes to statement pieces only she can pull off: retro faux fur, dreamy blunted-magenta puff coats, billowing maxi skirts as editorial as they are casual. Though her current evolution is not so much about the clothing as a new frequency, one that channels sovereignty and breakthrough while remaining modest and inviting. You feel this in her new music. At the beginning of a clear rebirth she exudes a relaxed urgency, the kind that arrives when you want to make up for time spent in the limbo of a romantic love that alters and enriches you but cannot last forever; you want to make it last a little longer, just to be sure. Then it’s over.
Each stunning string instrument leaning against the stark white wall is a tally and talking book, marking the value of a period of relative solitude and reflection. The creative mind loosens, there’s no judging or lurking audience, no one to argue or negotiate with, no one to become but the next iteration of herself, exposed and haloed by light in these enjambed rooms of her own. Every woman needs to live entirely alone for at least a little while, especially if she is an artist, in order to meet herself before giving parts of that identity away to accommodate another. It’s a luxury, a quantum leap, one that can save your imagination from a propensity to meek fatalism or received social patterns. You cannot make original work while trying too hard to fit in anywhere for any reason.
In Sudan’s case, she has outsmarted the risk of succumbing to tradition, and the freedom has raised and mellowed all stakes. One day she might be in costume for a shoot, wearing brutalist platforms and corsets and a face full of exaggerated glam, the next her braids might make the otherwise-understated outfit pop and swoon, another still, a tight dress and loose blazer help her blend in at an overhyped industry function. Sudan is confident and fluid in her styling, but never vain or flamboyant. There’s a mercenary quality to the more ostentatious looks; they please crowds or pacify them for long enough to compel closer listening to the intricacies of her music.
When Sudan styles herself for an afternoon at home without fittings or videos to prepare for, a new glamour emerges, a simple headwrap as cocoon and coronation as her accessories become the story — a pair of black Rick Owens boots, a golden pair of Schiaparelli earrings — glints of the regal and playful energy that you hear in the music. There’s a looming sense that it all could have been so different, so constricted by a one-and-only-love-type romance, that we must gulp the emancipation down before someone notices this new optimism and tries to steal it or woo it back into latency.
I really hear Soul II Soul’s hook “back to life/back to reality,” like a tapestry making piano-esque shadows against the light in the room. We discuss the panopticon, the lack of walls and how it forces better boundaries. Sudan muses about getting a curtain for privacy when she has guests. And we rejoice a little too candidly about the merits of solitude in creative life. Giddy, renegotiating the meaning of intimacy among friends can be so soothing.
Many people are theorizing the importance of being “a main character” on social media and in life; what’s refreshing and enduring about Sudan is that she does not need theory — she practices, acts, demonstrates her singularity, wears it out and maintains it inside when no one is watching. “I just want it to be real,” she assures me, when I ask if anything feels too personal, too revelatory. The music that comes of her dedication is as radiant, born of her own intentions. There’s something boundless about what’s next, an upward spiral without the density of too much ego to threaten its flow, an album so spot-on, satisfying a craving we didn’t know we had, one for serious joy, and so personal without being tedious, that it feels effortless, a meant-to-be reunion with the best versions of ourselves.
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