We hear Arlo Parks before we see her. The singer-songwriter emerges from the gloom at the back of this south-west London club’s stage words-first, speaking more than singing – her soft tones recognisable, even before we glimpse her Nine Inch Nails The Downward Spiral T-shirt and red-tinged, close-cropped hair. “I wish I was bruiseless,” Parks begins. Her band add some loose breakbeats and an intriguing jazzy thrum to a track that is the opening to her new album, My Soft Machine. “Almost everyone I love has been abused/ And I am included.”
Parks has been out of sight for some time, putting the finishing touches to her highly anticipated second full-length outing, released this week. But the first few seconds of her re-emergence at this low-key gig could not be a more succinct reminder of her appeal: the way she plants emotional depth charges inside a deceptively easygoing musical manner. We learn, too, as Bruiseless spools out, that she is “listening to Loomer” (by My Bloody Valentine) – and that “the person I love is feeding me cheese, and I’m happy”.
Some artists deal in generalities or aphorisms or riddles; others drill down into the granular and the personal, mining specifics for universal effect. Parks has both feet in the latter camp. Her debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, won the Mercury prize in 2021 with its closely observed vignettes. (“I hold the Taco Bell and you cried over Eugene,” ran one of its most-loved songs, Eugene.) Tonight, older songs such as Caroline and Black Dog locate her work in her native London – Oxford Street, corner shops – while almost photostatically preserving an arguing couple, or Parks facing down a friend’s depression.
Two Grammy nominations followed Collapsed in Sunbeams’s success in the UK, as well as support slots with huge names such as Harry Styles and Billie Eilish. A full-on touring schedule culminated in Parks cancelling some US dates last year in the interests of self-care. (Unsurprisingly, the evolving discussion about the mental health of musicians is close to her heart.) Of all the gen-Z bedroom poets throwing genre over their shoulders, Parks is one of the most instantly recognisable; a queer person of colour who can nail down her wider generation’s feeling of emotional exhaustion, or the crystalline clarity of a passing moment, in a tender coo that often references the cadences of hip-hop. Her words make frequent reference to colours, or fruits – the light with the weighty, the uncommon with the everyday. In among Parks’s many strengths, though, is one curious anomaly. Her music is more pleasant than impactful, with few distinguishing features given the wide range of influences she cites in songs and interviews.
Although a number of factors have changed in Parks’s setup, those qualities recur on My Soft Machine, which is named from a line in the 2019 film The Souvenir, rather than the band Soft Machine, or the William S Burroughs book The Soft Machine (though it does make reference to the human body). Parks now lives in LA and has access to pricey producers such as Ariel Rechtshaid and Briton Paul Epworth; just two of a handful that co-produced the record with her. She’s happily coupled-up with a fellow musician, Ashnikko. Her circle of friends includes Phoebe Bridgers, who collaborates on one of the new songs, Pegasus, released earlier this month. A melodic indie rock song with breakbeats, it attests to Parks’s romantic joy via “Prussian blue sheets” and “hard cherries”.
The good writing continues. Weightless finds the ever-watchful Parks noting “your deltoid flex as you cough on the phone”. Devotion, meanwhile, probably takes its title from Devotions, a collection of poetry by the late American writer Mary Oliver (Parks is a fan) and revels in love. “Your touch embroiders me,” sings Parks, her vocal rhythm invoking a touch of R&B as much as the grungey pop of the song’s finale. Deftones and Kim Deal are mentioned in the lyrics; Parks straps on an electric guitar for the noisy bit.
It would be fantastic if there were more memorable passages like it. If there is an inconsistency in Parks’s work, it’s that her more startling insights aren’t matched by the sounds around them; the jazz-poetry of Bruiseless does not recur past the first minute. Challenging themes do not inevitably demand challenging music, but Parks’s nuanced words deserve richer fare than the polite, mid-paced backings that accompany them tonight. Blades just percolates along serviceably, its light funk-pop and Chic guitar amiable enough but at odds with the charisma coming off Parks herself. There’s a pleasant old-time roll to Purple Phase, but the effect is wallpapery rather than committed.
In Parks’s introduction to her album, she speaks about “moving through worlds with wonder and sensitivity” as a response to “PTSD, grief and self-sabotage”. Her work has an uncommon degree of sensitivity, but an artist of Parks’s substance could use some tunes with a little more wonder in them.
