Arlo Parks is in love. Beaming widely to reveal a shiny metal tooth gem, the 25-year-old’s conversation is full of the sort of hopeful, glass-half-full language that comes with being absolutely, giddily bursting with the Big L. But while a newish romance (her partner also works in music but isn’t revealed by name) is certainly part of what’s giving Parks the feels, she’s also spent the time since 2023’s second album My Soft Machine falling in love with a whole new way of existing in the world: an attitude that sits at the core of looser, more beat-driven and exploratory third LP Ambiguous Desire, which is released this Friday.
“For my whole adult life, since I was 17, I’d always been on the move, and I loved what I was doing so much that it made sense for me in the moment to just completely devote my life to it,” she begins. “But after the second record, I wanted to take a little pause and see what it would look like to be spontaneous, and just be out in the world in a way that was more open rather than my life being in these little slices that it had been up until then.”
Born in Hammersmith, Parks came to prominence during the pandemic, when her reflective, world-building poetry and intimate musicality — an intoxicating, dreamlike mix of indie, trip-hop, jazz and more — immediately cemented her as a soothing new voice for a frazzled world. By the time the live circuit was back in action, Parks was already an award-winning star, bagging the Brit for Breakthrough Artist in 2021, and that year’s Mercury Prize for her debut Collapsed in Sunbeams shortly after.
The following year, she opened up for Billie Eilish on a UK arena tour and for Harry Styles in stadiums. Though much was reported of her decision to cancel a small handful of US live shows in 2022, citing that her mental health had “deteriorated to a debilitating place”, Parks was back on the promo trail mere months later, rolling straight into the release of My Soft Machine.
Today, sitting in her management’s Shoreditch office where we find the musical wordsmith almost comically in character, trying to maintain her streak on The New York Times’s Spelling Bee (“I try to get to genius level every day…”), Parks is diplomatic about the toll it takes to be a successful artist these days. “I have my values and my boundaries, but I’m content to have a bit of give and take if I get to do the thing I love,” she says carefully. Yet implicit in Ambiguous Desire’s narrative of pressing pause and stepping — temporarily at least — out of the rigorous pace and scheduling of her pop star life was the urge to see what a dose of “normality” could do.
In the time spent making the record, she remembers feeling “almost giddy” with the freedom. She would “go to the gym, read a little bit, go to the studio all day and just be experimenting. It was nice to approach it as a daily practice,” she says. “I would show up to work and I would do the work.” Did living like a normo reveal any gaping holes in her ability to adult? Any awkward moments realising she never learnt how to use a washing machine? “Oh no, you misunderstand the way that I live!” Parks laughs. “I’m very grounded. I’ve been at Tesco before where people are like, ‘Why are you here?!’ And I’m like, ‘Because I’m buying bread… like everyone else…’”
It’s a story that sits serendipitously adjacent to that of her former tour bud Styles’s current record Kiss All the Time, Disco Occasionally — although Parks’s story might be better subtitled Kiss All the Time, Disco Fairly Often as Well. “I really enjoy what he was talking about with spending time in Berlin and being in these club spaces, but also just sitting out and having a coffee on the side of the street,” Parks nods. “I can’t imagine what it would be like for him on that scale, but I definitely relate to how good it feels to dance and to move, and how good it feels to spend time just living, and to then see how that impacts your work and your music.”
She enthuses over the “anonymity” of the dancefloor. Tall and sporting a neon red crop of hair, Parks has, she admits, made a slight rod for her own back in terms of going under the radar. However, it’s not just the shadowy corners of the club that she’s been feeling most freed by, but an altogether deeper history of nightlife spaces and their place in counter-cultural and queer history.
Ever the curious student, she spent time reading up on “Paradise Garage and The Loft and Studio 54, and the history of certain DJs there like Larry Levan, and how this sense of community and chosen family was almost built out of the architecture of those spaces. It was in the walls that they were somewhere safe for queer people to be.” Having resided in Los Angeles for the past four years, but constantly travelling between the US, UK and Europe, Parks describes herself as “privileged” not to personally feel the threat of living as a queer person under Trump’s administration too strongly. But for her peers on the dancefloor, these spaces remain increasingly sacred.
“I think they’re essential,” she nods. “It’s not about escape, it’s about finding refuge and like-minded people who you feel understood by. People come together in these spaces to create things, whether that be art or relationships. They come to take action and move their bodies and be proud of their bodies, and that in itself is an act of resistance. For some people, it’s maybe the only time in the week when they don’t feel like outsiders — when they feel like they belong — and that’s a lifeline for people. We definitely need that more than ever.”
Ambiguous Desire may be getting branded as Parks’s “dance record”, but don’t go expecting an album of hedonistic slammers to soundtrack a night on the lash. Instead, the majority of these songs hover in the hazy, liminal spaces in between — in the 4am dawn walk home, or the snatch of remembered conversation from the smoking area. Parks calls herself “an introverted extrovert”. “I love being around people but I just think I’m quite a cerebral person in general,” she considers. “I feel really at home in my dreams and my studies and my imagination.”
She’s been thinking about Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon’s 2010’s band Body/Head, and how she wants to broach that divide. “That thing of getting in touch with my body and my gut, and having that on the dancefloor but it also translating to the way I approached this record and maybe music in general,” she continues. Recently, in the run-up to its release, she’s been popping up all over the place — DJing at the launch of George FitzGerald and Lil Silva’s new monthly club night Nowhere, and dropping a show on NTS Radio. Her tastes are broad and excitable; full of the joie de vivre she’s been talking about.
“There’ll be some amapiano and Afrobeats, maybe some rare African music that I’ve discovered — there’s a lot of amazing psychedelic rock coming out of Zambia and Ghana. And then I’ll play some techno and minimal house, leading into the disco and soul of New York and then going into Baltimore club,” she enthuses before laughing: “I feel like it’s an interesting balance between making people feel slightly challenged but also giving them a soft space to land because we all wanna dance to Flowers for a bit at some point!”
Over the last couple of years, Parks has cracked open her landscape to let a little more fun and lightness in. “I did have to back myself in a world where being productive as an artist is really valued,” she says. “It took some confidence to sit back and say: I need to do this my way if I’m going to make my best work.” Her joyous DJ sets are already giving her fans their Flowers — it seems only fair that Parks gets hers too.
Ambiguous Desire is out on April 3; Arlo Parks plays Rough Trade East on April 7
