There’s also the fact that—unlike with Natural Brown Prom Queen, which featured an eclectic roster of collaborators—Parks worked solely with her sister, a cousin from Detroit, and one of her best friends on the songwriting and production for The BPM, allowing her to express herself in ways she hadn’t previously felt able to. “When you’re around your family and when you’re having a good time, that’s a special energy I wouldn’t be able to re-create on my own in LA,” she says. “I just got high off of that energy.” Those intimate relationships encouraged her to head into new, previously unexplored lyrical territory, spanning mental illness, heartbreak, and the euphoric joy of letting it all go in the club. “It was way more organic, and it ended up bringing out all these personalities and characters that would only otherwise come out if I was lit at a club with my cousin,” Parks adds, with a laugh.

It’s a spirit that is palpable on the second single, “My Type,” released today. In it, she reels through a rogues’ gallery of bold women in her life she admires (“She steady flossin’, she bought a loft then / She moved to Compton, then moved to Spain,” Parks raps over icy synths and a finger-snapping beat), with a delicious ambiguity around whether her affections are merely friendly or based in a carnal desire. Oh, and it comes accompanied by a delightfully bonkers video in which Parks sits at a desk in front of various pieces of computer equipment “coding the perfect me,” before appearing as a series of cyber avatars in a futuristic industrial space.

That sci-fi aesthetic also crops up on the album cover, where cables sprout from her back, as well as on songs like “A Computer Love” and “Ms. Pac Man”; ever since watching Minority Report as a kid, Parks has been a sci-fi obsessive. “My life is like a sci-fi—I really feel like that sometimes,” she says. “Everything I do is just, like, I’m trying to figure out how to make some gear compatible with something that I want to do with the music.”