SUDAN ARCHIVES The BPM (Stones Throw) — The prom queen has been usurped by Gadget Girl. That’s the persona Sudan Archives slips into for The BPM, her third full-length effort, and the music she makes reflects the implication that she’s given herself over to technology. If her prior efforts found Sudan Archives navigating through a lifetime of disparate influences, the new album commits wholeheartedly to electronic dance music. That’s not to say that the music sounds all that conventional. Sudan Archives is too iconoclastic for that. “Come and Find You” is slithery neo-soul with bright studio effects slicing through it like sword swipes, and “She’s Got Pain” sounds like a synthesized jig. She avoids the trap of redundant grooves by giving the songs different contours: the brash “Ms. Pac Man” or the catchy, hip-hop “My Type.” Sometimes, she finds those contrasts in the same sonic space, as when the pulsing, insistent music of “A Bug’s Life” is cut with her cool, relaxed lead vocals. The violin that Sudan Archives mastered when she was just a child is less prominent here, which only makes its appearances — catch the flourishes in the short, super-stuffed “Los Cinci” — all the more distinct and riveting. If The BPM is less immediately arresting than its immediate predecessor, Natural Brown Prom Queen, there’s a welcome sense that Sudan Archives isn’t sitting still and rehashing past accomplishments. She is all surprises. Keep the beat with the following cuts: “Dead,” “The Nature of Power,” and “Noire.”

THE LAST DINNER PARTY From the Pyre (Island) — Give the Last Dinner Party credit for being prolific. The London-based band’s attention-getting debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, came out just last year, and now here’s the follow-up already. What From the Pyre lacks in the jolt of the new is counterbalanced by a more devoted committed to the fulsome theatrics of baroque pop. “Woman Is a Tree” sounds like the ballad that would play over the opening credits of a feminist neo-western, and the instinct to make comparisons to sweeping cinema is stirred up again and again. The group adheres to some basic pop principles within that scale. No matter how grand “Second Best” is, the main impression is that its brightly catchy. There’s also a seething intensity present on the album. “This Is the Killer Speaking” has a swooping chorus, but it also swings over to a focused sternness that recalls Patti Smith when she moved a couple concentric circles away from her punk days. The piano ballad “Sail Away” shows the Last Dinner Party can also go a little smaller and retain their vastness. This Pyre burns. Feel the heat with these tracks: “Angus Dei,” “I Hold Your Anger” and “The Scythe.”

ELIZA McLAMB Good Story (Royal Mountain) — Eliza McLamb writes songs like unvarnished truth is the responsibility that comes with assembling chords and words into something that will get people humming along. Take “Better Song,” the opener of the new album Good Story, as a handy example. The tracks builds from spare, hard beginnings to the magnificent squall of guitar as McLamb unleashes lyrics such as “You tore me apart that week in L.A./ I could see the fire burning through your face/ I know you hate me, and now you’ve said it/ Well, I love you and I don’t regret it.” That’s a heart that is fully open, even as cracking that wide invariably invites wounds. McLamb is from North Carolina, and there’s some hints of mountain folk music in her craft; the plaintive twang of “Girls I Know” was made to echo off of rolling terrain. That humility of the foundational tunes of her homeland probably inspires some of the economy found on Good Story, too. “Promise” and “Water Inside the Fence” are both affecting with runtimes comfortably under two minutes. McLamb doesn’t shrink from her moment. She takes proper stands, as with the rueful, tough “Suffering” or even a touch of what-a-world-this-is swagger that evokes vintage Sheryl Crow on “Forever, Like That” (“That’s what I say now that I’ve seen/ That I’m stupid in the moment and so wise when I look back/ I thought I understood it, what a time I’ve had”). In addition to those already noted, check the following cuts: “California,” “Talisman,” and “Getting Free.”