Arlo Parks heralds new album with warm-up dance track ‘2SIDED’
In late 2022, just when things were reaching their peak, Mercury Prize-winning musician Arlo Parks paused a touring stint to address her severe mental health decline, and now, some four years later, has returned with news of a new album, Ambiguous Desire, kicking things off with the gentle new dance track, ‘2SIDED’.
In the time that Parks has spent away from the limelight, it appears that she has been dancing, and as a result, the new record, she promises, draws inspiration from the “queer hedonism of NYC’s Paradise Garage” and “the glittering synth catharsis” of LCD Soundsystem, with The Streets and Theo Parrish thrown in for good measure.
Gone is the deceptively delicate subversive bedroom pop of her 2021 debut, Collapsed in Sunbeam, and the summer-shine indie-pop goodness of 2023’s follow-up, My Soft Machine, for on the new project, Parks channels the vibrant, frenetic rave space.
Explaining the new track, which swaps out a live band for a modular synth, the musician revealed, “At its core, ‘2SIDED’ is about yearning and tension. It’s about being struck by a bolt of desire and building up the courage to put language to that feeling, to make it real,” adding that desire will be at the centre of her third album.
Too bad, then, that the overall affectation is a little placid, relying on repetition, rather than any variation to convey the capricious nature of yearning, to convey the spark of a new love.
Parks’ voice boasts a gruff timbre that has been sorely missed, but stays low throughout, and though it brings out the chiming rotundity of the simple but effective lyricism (“I never really feel at home anywhere / It’s the right place at the wrong time,” she confesses), it leaves the listener wanting more. It’s sugary and addictive, sure, but in the way of candy-floss, threatening to evaporate should it not hold onto something more substantial.
Perhaps this is Parks’ ultimate comment on the insatiability of desire, but it’s a good thing the twice Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter has more to come, as it feels like with ‘2SIDED’, she is just getting warmed up.
Ambiguous Desire will be released in full on April 3rd via Transgressive Records.
Arlo Parks—Ambiguous Desire tracklist:
- ‘Blue Disco’
- ‘Jetta’
- ‘Get Go’
- ‘Senses (feat Sampha)’
- ‘Heaven’
- ‘Beams’
- ‘South Seconds’
- ‘Nightswimming’
- ‘2SIDED’
- ‘Luck Of Life’
- ‘What If I Say It?’
- ‘Floette’
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