A couple of years ago, Arlo Parks found herself in a nightclub, consoling a complete stranger.
“It was the summer in New York, and everyone in the club was super-friendly,” she recalls. “But there was a group of girls surrounding their friend, and she seemed really upset.
“I was standing near them, and I said something like, ‘I hope you’re OK’, and I got drawn into this whole tale of love triangles and drama.”
“We were sort of figuring it out together and, by the end, everyone was like, ‘Yeah, you’re better off without him’.
“So we all went onto the dance floor and celebrated this decision she’d made for the rest of the night.”
It’s exactly the sort of experience that inspired the singer’s third album, Ambiguous Desire.
A pulsing exploration of party culture and collective movement, it’s a departure from the tender, introspective ballads on her Mercury Prize-winning debut, Collapsed In Sunbeams and its 2023 follow-up, My Soft Machine.
She taps into the club’s night rhythms, embracing the heat, the sweat, and the permissiveness. Her lyrical themes are familiar – yearning desire, romantic uncertainty – but there’s a newfound freedom in dancing her cares away.
The album reflects a change in the 25-year-old’s own life. Until relatively recently, she’d never even been to a nightclub.
That’s because Parks, born Anais Marinho, signed a record deal when she was still at school. She released her first album a few months after turning 20, and spent the next four years on the road, including support slots with Harry Styles and Billie Eilish.
After wrapping up her 2023 Soft Machine tour, she decided it was time to catch up on everything she’d missed.
“I knew that I wanted to take time to pause and live my life,” she says.
“I ended up spending a lot more time dancing and getting out of my head and more into my body.”
What she discovered, with close friends and heartbroken strangers, was a sort of hyperreality. Every facet of life – joy, despair and everything in between – co-existed under the strobe lights.
“Everyone’s guard is down, and everyone’s equally vulnerable. There’s all these little snippets of conversation and fleeting, really intense, connections.”
Those vignettes became source material for her new music. A poet before she was a songwriter, Parks has a knack for dropping you into stories that feel instantly familiar.
On the captivating, glitchy club track Heaven, she transports us to a gig by Kelly Lee Owens, under the 6th Street Viaduct bridge in Los Angeles, where “bodies in the summer breeze” are surrounded by concrete and the smell of gasoline.
In the confusion and the noise, she’s trying to locate her friend.
“And she was like, ‘Look down. I’m wearing the pink Adidas’,” recalls Parks. That tiny detail slips into the lyrics, bringing the song to life.
Get Go is a homage to London, with snatches of pirate radio and a crisp two-step beat, articulating a story about the therapeutic feeling of dancing with strangers.
It was inspired by “a friend of mine who’d just broken up with her boyfriend,” she explains.
“I was like, ‘Let’s just go dancing. Let’s be flooded with loud music, and you can cry, and we can just release this.'”
Blue Disco shifts focus to an afterparty at Park’s house, where someone’s cousin has thrown up and “everything smells of chips and gin”.
“I’m always the host because I love to cook and I love to DJ,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll put my decks on my living room table and just do a little set for my friends.”
Learning to cook, it transpires, was the second strand of her plan to reclaim some normality after the whirlwind of her early 20s.
“I was like, ‘I want to get good at this’, because when you’re coming down, you need to eat,” she laughs.
“I do a really nice roast chicken. I love doing a spread of tacos and salads… but the best hangover cure’s a proper English breakfast. That’ll get me right in the morning.”
The glitchy breakbeats and thrumming basslines of Ambiguous Desire are a major shift for the singer-songwriter – but they always feel authentic.
A thinker and a planner, Parks immersed herself in research.
She bought books about club culture, studied the architecture of communal spaces, and downloaded legendary DJ sets from New York’s Paradise Garage.
Across the album, she references everyone from LCD Soundsystem and Burial to Jamie xx and Goldie – and yet, there’s a connection to her earlier work. Parks’ breathy vocals and soul-searching introspection fit snugly within the musical world she’s created.
“My music has always been a collage,” she says. “I just take what intrigues me from different genres and different moods and apply them to the stories I want to tell.”
That’s good news for fans who fell in love with the yearning empathy of early songs like Black Dog, Eugene and Weightless.
On Beams, the album’s most vulnerable song, she uses the looping structures of dance music to represent the turmoil of wanting to end a relationship.
“I know it’s the right thing to do but I don’t wanna,” she repeats, as synths swirl around her.
“I wanted the repetition to mirror those cyclical thoughts – a spiral or a fixation on one specific feeling,” she says.
Elsewhere, she uses that same device of repetition to freeze-frame happy memories – representing a new way of thinking.
“When I’m at my most joyful or euphoric, I feel like I’ve seen heaven for a moment,” she says.
“But there used to be a thing that happened straight after, where I’d think, ‘This moment is going to end, and I wish I could feel that way forever.’
“What I’ve come to accept is that these moments are fleeting and that’s beautiful in itself. It took me a long time to figure that out.”
Living in the present has helped her love life, too.
The recent single 2Sided depicts a night where Parks was reluctant to leave the house; only finding motivation in the chance she’d bump into her crush.
“We’ve all had that moment of wandering into a club and scanning the room with your peripheral vision and being like, ‘Are they there? Are they there?'” she says.
“So the song’s about that tension of having a connection with someone, but not being quite sure what that connection is. Then the chorus is having built up the courage to put it all on the line and say what you feel. It’s just like this explosion of feeling.”
It’s the true story, she says, of “falling in love with my partner” across a laser-lit dancefloor.
“Usually I’m not the first one to make a move, but this time I was,” she says, shyly.
“There’s certain situations where pride holds you back – but sometimes you have to just shed that pride and go for it.”
That lack of fear percolates through Ambiguous Desire, where every pang of doubt is offset by a moment of euphoria or beauty.
In person, she has a newfound ease and confidence that suggests her nocturnal odysseys paid off. But did she ever worry that taking a break from music, and coming back with a brand new sound, would jeopardise her career?
“I mean, there’s always that feeling, especially in a period where people are constantly generating content and being prolific,” she admits.
“But I also was thinking a lot about artists that I really looked up to like Radiohead or Bjork or Sampha, taking their time to make records that feel timeless and generational.
“So I was like, I don’t necessarily want it to be the most giant album of all time, and be selling out stadiums.
“I want something that lasts.”
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