Arlo Parks Finds Love, On And Off The Dance Floor

It’s a freezing early December night in the heart of Bushwick, Brooklyn, and 500 Arlo Parks fans slowly shuffle into the converted garage SILO to hear … well, they don’t exactly know what. To be sure, they’re unaware that Parks’ third Transgressive album, Ambiguous Desire, is finished, since the 25-year-old, two-time Grammy nominee teased these intimate gigs here and in London and New York only as an unconventional way to bring her “studio setup to the stage for a journey through old and new material” with producer, bandmate and longtime collaborator Baird.

Once inside, it’s immediately clear this is no ordinary show, even for an artist as comfortable opening for Harry Styles and Billie Eilish in enormodomes as she is headlining increasingly large clubs and theaters on her own. For starters, the stage is smack in the middle of the floor, the audience is inches away from the performers, the rectangular riser loaded with gear is barely three feet off the ground and the primary light in the darkened room emanates from a bespoke box hung from the ceiling directly above. For another, the music itself is new and beguiling. It’s heavily electronic and club-friendly, but still reliant on Parks’ familiar plaintive guitar hooks and irresistible vocal melodies. It’s as intimate as can be but rendered with artifice-free candor by an artist whose wise-beyond-their-years insights into gender, sexuality and mental health have won her the admiration of peers and critics alike.

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In New York, the bright red-haired Parks twists knobs to manipulate the shimmering, dance-forward textures and lopes around the stage while singing intently about new desires, bodies swaying in summer breezes, fear of commitment, Jetta rides that would be a lot more fun in the company of that special someone and those endless, music- and friend-filled nights that help drown out the constant noise of life, if only for a few hours. “Let’s get involved / until the dawn breaks,” she coos on the certified banger “Heaven,” one of several new songs tailor-made to be born again in the hands of a skilled remixer.

Parks’ transition into this fresh and fertile sonic territory begins to make even more sense when she dusts off a couple oldies, including her breakthrough hit “Eugene” from her Mercury Music Prize-winning 2021 debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams. The gently thrumming electro-bedroom masterpiece, which has more than 93 million Spotify streams, carries numerous of Parks’ threads through into the present with panache: the head-nodding beats and bass lines, the disarming sweetness of the vocal, the fluid nature of lust and friendship.

Parks, who was born Isa Marinho in London to parents of French and African descent, continues the party five miles north at new lower Manhattan hotspot Nightclub 101, where she spins dance classics from Underworld, Madonna, Robyn and Caribou into the wee hours encircled by her closest pals. Among them is Del Water Gap frontman Holden Jaffe, who has experienced firsthand how Parks prioritizes nurturing both her own music and the lives and work of her best friends.

“I’ve spent the last couple years going to Isa’s house in L.A. every couple weeks to eat food, hang out and DJ,” he says. “There’s candles and wine and pizza and I’ve heard beautiful and obscure music I’ve felt lucky to discover. The house has become a space for me and a handful of other folks to feel a semblance of community in a city that can seem really lonely and fragmented. The warmup shows felt the same way, because Isa has a knack for hosting and building an atmosphere that feels like home.”

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A few days later, but still several weeks away from the proper announcement that the album will be out April 3, Parks is beaming. The underplays gave her a chance to introduce fans to the palette of Ambiguous Desire without giving away all the surprises—and to offer an uncommon glimpse into her creative flow. “This slightly more experimental, freewheeling process that we had in the studio mirrors the way the album sounds, and, having been away for a while, I felt the fans deserved to have a sense of and see the workings out in public,” she says between bites of yogurt, granola and sourdough toast at a downtown New York hotel. “It’s always something I knew I wanted to do, because It’s rare that people play seven or eight new songs in a unique setup, before anyone even knows that an album exists. It was me really wanting to bring people closer and for them to understand what I’ve been doing.”

What she’s been doing is, in no particular order: publishing her first volume of poetry, guesting on tunes with Del Water Gap and Khalid, singing impromptu with Noah Kahan in front of a 50,000-strong Canadian festival crowd, helping write the Grammy-nominated song “YA YA” for Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning country album COWBOY CARTER, learning to DJ, looking fly at the Hermes Men’s Show in Paris, traveling to Sierra Leone with UNICEF to elevate child mental health initiatives and… falling madly in love.

The latter turn of events is the primary, but not exclusive, source of inspiration for Ambiguous Desire, which crackles with kinetic dance floor energy and expertly rendered, mood-setting atmospherics in equal measure. Highlights include the head-nodding, Goldie- and Prince-referencing opener “Blue Disco,” the soul-baring, breakbeat-bolstered confessional “Beams,” the sensual, propulsive “Get Go” and the spare, drum-less “South Seconds,” named after the Brooklyn street where her current relationship fully bloomed.

“It’s a love song, but it’s about the growing pains of real, true love,” Parks says of the latter. “It can be scary to show those parts of yourself, like when I say, ‘you won’t be able to unsee that’ — especially if it’s somebody that you feel like you want to be with for the rest of your life. You do have to peel back the shell in a way that can be painful but in a way that ultimately is the true beauty of what it is to love. Also, it was important to have a real reference to that place. That apartment carries so much with it and I wanted to immortalize it in the song.” I then ask Parks, can you write songs like this when you’re not head over heels?

“No!,” she exclaims twice, specifically referencing “Get Go” as embodying not only the sense of abandon that love brings but also the confidence and courage. “The dance floor can be a place to heal a broken heart as well as to fall in love and embody that love,” she notes. “It’s important that in so many of these songs where I am talking about this yearning or tension, it’s just part of being alive and part of love, rather than it being something that’s necessarily sad or negative. That’s what makes these emotions sometimes feel so elusive.”

The subject is explored from a different lens on “Heaven,” which Parks concedes is “the heart of or the embodiment of the record in so many different fronts. The confidence. The storytelling in a way that blended slightly more journalistic musing in the second verse, and then the first verse being like, I was there with Kelly [Lee Owens] watching her DJ, the green light, the silver light, the Diet Coke. It’s that hyper-specific blended with the more pensive or philosophizing part of it. That second verse is one of my favorites that I wrote on the record also, because again, it’s about being present. Sometimes when I’m at the peak of having the most wonderful time and I’m just in it, I wish I could feel like that way all the time. And then, that spoils my enjoyment of the moment [with] this awareness of the ending. Maybe knowing that I can have this feeling and let it go is what will actually let me lose myself in this moment. That was me also just trying to reckon with my own relationship to time and finality. Even with this record, I’m always like, I think that was my last good song. I just have that way of thinking sometimes, so I was trying to encourage myself to let things come and go.”

Cohabitating with her similarly talented and creatively focused partner “was inspiring in a profound way on like 10 different levels, which is really special,” she admits. “Being in the same household — accumulating books, watching films together, being steeped in each other’s art and also having our individual practices — gave me more space to just play. I haven’t really had that before — creating a home with somebody who also understands how sacred home is.”

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Ambiguous Desire also reflects on other matters of the heart, from reckoning with longstanding familial trauma to sidestepping grief and self-sabotage. Those themes are best heard on the righteous Sampha duet “Senses,” which feels lifted straight from Parks’ journal. “He and [Blood Orange’s] Dev Hynes are two genre-fluid, black British artists that have meant a lot to me. I listened to him freestyle for hours and hours and hours over the track, and I was just in awe of that process,” she says of Sampha. “We were watching some crazy Afro-futurist film with the sound off. It made for a very spiritual afternoon.”

Vagabon’s Laetitia Tamko opened for Parks on a 2023 European tour and observed as she “lived these lyrics, lived this production and showed the bravery and courage to love and share again. Isa is a student of the craft, the archives, the legacy. That knowledge arms them to break past form and rebuild it in its new and current mold. For the artists I respect, that is the way.”

“Having a group around me who are also sprawling in different genres — it’s not like a ‘scene,’ which I love,” Parks says. “It feels like I have this safety net and sounding board, but also these cheerleaders. It’s really special, and I know that not everyone has that, at all. This sense of there being limited seats at the table is so destructive. It was almost life-changing to start making friends who understand the hardships of it, but also the positives, and just how crazy it is to have this life. It’s very weird and specific and beautiful (laughs). They’re people who are nerds like me and have an encyclopedic knowledge in music, where if I play something, it’s like, oh, you should check out this weird Pinback deep cut, or, I’m going to see a cellist who no one knows and you’re coming with me. I love having people around who will get as excited about what I’m creating as I do.”

As evidenced by Parks’ COWBOY CARTER contribution, her work now stands to flourish even further in the hands of other interpreters (indeed, two absolutely massive pop stars are currently considering material Parks submitted to them, at their request). But with Ambiguous Desire soon to arrive, and an extensive 2026 tour set to begin Aug. 31 in Philadelphia following a handful of April U.K. gigs, she’s more confident than ever about her own personal and artistic evolution.

“These electronic sounds have always been a part of me, but when those references began spilling out, the parameters I’d set up about what the Arlo Parks thing is just fell away,” she says. “I’m proud of the risks that I took. I’m proud of the patience that I had in making the record, because it was very much me saying, I’m going to devote 14 hours every day for years to get this right. Ambiguous Desire came from being three records in and wanting to approach it with a more intricate and fearless process, and using instrumentation that feels surprising. It wasn’t like I was doing it intentionally — I was just being true.”

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‘Ambiguous Desire’ crackles with kinetic dance floor energy and expertly rendered, mood-setting atmospherics in equal measure.Jonathan Cohen{authorlink}https://www.spinmagazine.com/feed/SPINMusic News, Album Reviews, Concert Photos, Videos and Morehttps://static.spinmagazine.com/files/2023/08/cropped-logo-spin-s-340×340.png