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.”
