Sudan Archives - Natural Brown Prom Queen (2LP)

Sudan Archives makes music that feels like a room you want to live in. Natural Brown Prom Queen, released September 9, 2022 on Stones Throw Records, is the rare second album that expands the world of a debut without losing the spark that built it. Brittney Parks slips between violin flights, punchy drum programming, and frank, funny lyrics with a confidence that feels earned. You hear it in the first few seconds of Home Maker, a single that turns a domestic mantra into a flex. The beat is plush, the strings glide, and her voice sits right in the pocket, inviting you to settle in and look around.

Parks built her name by folding African fiddle traditions into R&B and beat scene sensibilities, and that throughline still drives the record. The violin is a lead character, not a garnish. It scrapes, sighs, and swoops, often answering her vocal lines like an old friend on speakerphone. What’s new is how widescreen everything feels. She produced much of it herself, and the arrangements are bolder and more playful, switching from swagger to tenderness in a bar or two. The title isn’t just moodboard fodder either. This is a coming‑of‑age epic told in fragments, a story about colorism, body autonomy, and self‑worth that still leaves room for jokes, lust, and late‑night car talk.

The singles chart the album’s terrain. Selfish Soul is a fearless hair anthem, rooted in the politics of texture and length but delivered with a hook that burrows in. It nods to the way Black hair becomes a public conversation, then insists on private joy. NBPQ (Topless) pulls the curtain back even further, taking aim at colorist beauty standards with a chant that turns defiance into a chant‑along. Both tracks move like club records, yet they never let the message get lost in the mix. Home Maker, for its part, flips the idea of nesting into a kind of sensual hospitality. She sings about folding clothes and buying flowers like someone scoring a heist, and it lands because the grooves are that tight.

The deep cuts keep giving. ChevyS10 rides low on elastic bass, name‑checking a compact pickup and turning it into a shorthand for the kind of scrappy love story that feels better than any luxury coupe. Loyal (EDD) captures the weird economics of the early 2020s, threading unemployment acronyms into a conversation about trust and survival. OMG BRITT pops up like a mischievous interlude, a little wink that breaks the fourth wall without derailing the flow. Across all of it, the sequencing is sharp. She can pivot from a whisper to a taunt, from a fiddle solo to a trap snap, and it never feels pasted together.

Critics heard the leap. Pitchfork stamped it Best New Music, NPR put it in heavy rotation, and The Guardian and Rolling Stone both praised the ambition and execution. The Metacritic summary reads like a wall of green, and it showed up on a lot of 2022 year‑end lists for good reason. There are artists who fuse styles and you can see the seams. Here, the blend feels lived‑in. Part of that comes from how direct Parks is as a writer. She doesn’t hide behind metaphor unless it adds voltage. Part of it comes from the violin, which she bends into a lead synth one minute and a dusty fiddle the next.

If you are a crate digger, Natural Brown Prom Queen vinyl is a no‑brainer. The low end on Home Maker and NBPQ makes a stylus purr, and those string runs take on extra grain on wax. Stones Throw tends to treat packaging with care, and Sudan Archives albums on vinyl have a way of sticking around in the stack because they play well front to back. I have pointed friends toward Sudan Archives vinyl more times than I can count, and it always lands. If you are browsing a Melbourne record store, flip to the S’s and you might hear a clerk call it out before you even ask. And if you prefer to buy Sudan Archives records online, this title is the one to start with, whether you are in the States or hunting through vinyl records Australia shops that stock adventurous R&B.

Natural Brown Prom Queen feels like a door swinging open. It’s rooted in the DIY precision that made her early work so magnetic, yet it reaches for bigger stages and bigger conversations. Put it on when you want the room to glow a little, when you want lyrics that talk back, and when you want to hear a violin do things nobody warned you about.