Arlo Parks Gets Involved - “Ambiguous Desire”
Credit: Arlo Parks – Ambiguous Desire via Transgressive
In the 1990s, the Jenny Holzer truism "It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender" became an art world mantra. In the 2010s, Tumblr fed it to the masses and a backlash ensued, labelling its admirers basic. Another decade on and the scales tipped again as millions of us baked bread, banged pots for frontline workers, and embraced Arlo Parks the moment we met her music.
The six years since her debut have given all of us license to toughen up, but on her third album, Ambiguous Desire (Transgressive Records), Hammersmith’s most well-known tenderheart keeps choosing softness. Her velvet vocals now float above something harder, though: a foundation battle-tested by a world gone inside-out. The result is a call to intimacy and expansion. If unchecked power wants us divided and accounted for, the new songs wonder, what if we combined and let ourselves loose instead?
The lead single, 2SIDED, is meant to hint at Croydon nightlife in the early 2000s, Parks says – depressive but euphoric, catchy but complicated, sinew and bone in each byte. The second, a gently propulsive track called Heaven, was prompted by what she calls a “transcendent experience” last year: beneath a remix of Radiohead’s Everything in Its Right Place, a growing sense of limerence between friends led to her feeling “like I was beaming out of my body… the next day, I was writing the song.” “Let’s get involved,” the vocals suggest over tumbling breakbeats.
Londoners gathered last November as the musician debuted new tracks alongside fan favorites at The Bath House in Hackney. The venue choice was layered with intention: she’d just recorded Senses with Sampha in a studio nearby, and the Victorian building’s fate as a community center had recently been secured through fervent local petitioning. Walking into the performance space, I passed someone, barefoot, sprawled on a sofa, eating nachos as if at home. Clawed back from the maw of private investments, this place is, at present, a living room for any and all to put their feet up, pet a cat (feline inhabitants include “Michael” and “Smudge”), enjoy some music, or play a game of chess. The paper-and-pen guest list is optional. No purchase is required for entry; you can come and go as you please, stay as long as you like.
Image take by writer.
The night began with New Desire, a midtempo track absent from the album. It starts with a friend’s voice memo, vowing to dance with whomever they’re drawn to. This, it implies, is the vibe right now: nocturnal spaces, connection in the chaos, stolen moments of freedom under the fist.
Sonically, the performance referenced Burial, Massive Attack, and Portishead, summoning the heady somatic effect an ethereal voice can induce when threaded through heavier textures. The new lyrics speak to the autonomy and anonymity of being alone together in a dark place, with the option but not obligation for connection. Dance beats thrum beneath sincere gestures of longing and lightness, evoking the past to imagine a gentler, or more liberated, future: one outside the panopticon, off the apps and into one another. Seeking solace from the world outside, the evening’s reverent crowd spanned five generations, including one septuagenarian who sang right along to Eugene.
Earnestness and empathy have always been Parks’ hallmarks. In 2021, newly vaccinated after eons of standing six feet apart, we were all acquainting ourselves with the idea of collective effervescence when I went to her show at Empire Control Room in Austin. Since that night, I’ve likened the sensory experience of attending her shows to that of being held aloft in a sea of plush animal toys: teddy bears, all of us, looking for someone to hug. Blinking into stage lights as if emerging from caves into the sun, we cheered when she told us her friend Alice, the subject of the previous year’s single, Black Dog, was feeling much better now, thank you. Our sigh of relief was deep, reflexive. We were all Alice, down the rabbit hole and back again, now with fruit from the corner store.
In the years since, she’s collected a glut of industry awards but seems to stay porous, absorbing the energy of fellow travellers who, like her, feel too much to ever not fidget a little. She’s noted in interviews that her first album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, faced outward during a period of pandemic-induced isolation, while its follow-up, Soft Machine, faced inward through a public stretch of touring, promotion, and newfound fame. Her third focuses on intimate, if ephemeral, personal connections – gathering in difficult times, looking for solace and release, sensual or otherwise – and invites us onto a dance floor, free from prying eyes.
Ambiguous Desire is out now via Transgressive Records.