As a sensitive, young artist best known for her poetic lyrics, shy-girl vocals and gentle indie-pop sounds, Arlo Parks didn’t seem to be on track for a Brat summer. But it turns out she’s been partying hard since the release of her second album, 2023’s My Soft Machine, and has flooded her third record, Ambiguous Desire, with house, techno and UK garage beats. Embedded in these songs are tales of strobe lights, DJ decks, gin, chips and hand-rolled cigarettes “in the guts of New York”. The tense, murky blur of bass and click-tap-rattle percussion contrasts powerfully with the sweetness of her voice, singing of her innocent yearning for connection.
Born Anaïs Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho in 2000, Parks felt like an outsider while growing up in west London. She once described a high-school experience of "feeling like that Black kid who couldn't dance for s***, listening to too much emo music and crushing on some girl in her Spanish class”. But the delicate feng shui of her introspective, interior music resonated with the “Super Sad Generation” (after whom she named her debut EP). Meanwhile, her first album Collapsed in Sunbeams (2020) became a lockdown hit, winning the 2021 Mercury Prize.
