Arlo Parks shares new single ‘Impurities’
British singer-songwriter Arlo Parks is preparing for the release of her second full-length studio album, My Soft Machine, later this year. The Mercury Prize winner has already shared the album’s first preview single with ‘Weightless’, and now, we’re getting a second look at the new LP with the single ‘Impurities’.
Like the backing track for ‘Weightless’, ‘Impurities’ features a dreamy mix of synthesisers and drum machines that float around the track. Parks has gotten to the point where the actual music backing up her voice is becoming less and less important. That’s what happens when you find your voice – the best that you can say about ‘Impurities’ is that it’s signature Arlo Parks; the worst thing that you can say about it is that it sounds like every other Arlo Parks song.
The good news is that Parks is really hitting her stride. What made Collapsed in Sunbeams so unique wasn’t the backing tracks but Parks herself. The messages she had in her lyrics and her singular ear for melody were what made her a star, and ‘Impurities’ finds her working right within her wheelhouse, praising the community around her and celebrating the faults and flaws that make each person unique.
“It’s about being around people who make you feel like your inner ugliness and failures and mistakes don’t matter,” Parks explained in a statement accompanying the song’s release, “who lift you up and make you laugh, who make you feel good and clean.”
The song also comes complete with a new video from director Jak Payne. “With this visualiser, I really wanted to convey this atmospheric oscillation between solitude and companionship – I wanted to show how being around your people really does feel like coming home. When I was writing this song I had been thinking about Gus Van Sant a lot and how he captures people in all their fragility and beauty and ugliness – Jak was instrumental in creating/protecting that sense of softness.”
Softness seems to be the overriding theme of Parks’ current style. She has a killer non-album track called ‘Softly’ that helped usher in her post-Sunbeams era. The new album is called My Soft Machine, and the dynamics that Parks is employing in her music can best be described in that way as well: soft. It’s all very engrossing, but here’s hoping that the next single is just slightly more varied than the sameness that inevitably filters into ‘Impurities’.
Check out the video for ‘Impurities’ down below. My Soft Machine is set for a May 26th release.
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