In her teens, the Mercury prize-winning musician was stuck on tour buses when she should have been on the dancefloor. Now she is throwing herself into club culture – and living on her own terms
Until only a few years ago, Arlo Parks had never been clubbing. The lack of a party phase makes sense when you consider that while most of her friends were decamping to university at 18, Parks was busy bagging a record deal, releasing her debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, a few months after her 20th birthday. “It’s something that I almost didn’t have time to think about,” she says, speaking from LA, where she has lived since 2022, and where she feels very much at home. (This morning has already consisted of gymming and a walk in 28-degree sunshine that’s as bright as her neon-red hair.) “But I definitely did come to the conclusion that I had missed out – I hadn’t really had the time to be silly and have crazy, deep conversations in the smoking area. To be in an anonymous space and feel like you’re part of this whole.”
Now 25, she has very much made up for lost time with her third album, Ambiguous Desire – a paean to the night-time, which fuses elements of house, techno, UK garage and more with Parks’s celestial, feather-light vocals. While she hasn’t ditched the guitars altogether, it’s a long way from where we were when we first met Parks, born Anaïs Marinho, back in 2018. Fresh out of sixth form, where she had honed her craft via GarageBand, hers was a confessional, clear-eyed strain of alt-pop, with influences that ranged from Nick Cave to Erykah Badu. Before long, she had signed with an agent and nabbed that aforementioned record deal with Transgressive, fuelled by youthful chutzpah rather than any nepo connections. While her songs were often laced with perfectly curated cultural callbacks (“You do your eyes like Robert Smith,” she cooed on Black Dog), she didn’t shy away from singing about mental health, romantic rejection or drug abuse. One of the top comments on the YouTube video for her early single Eugene reads: “It’s so undignified for a 51-year-old bloke to be crying on a train about a song but here I am.”
Continue reading...
