“I really put the rawest part of me into this one”
BY SCARLETT CLARKE, IMAGE BY IMOGEN SNELL AND RICCARDO CASTANO AT ISSTUDIO (CREATIVE DIRECTION), SHEA MCCHRYSTAL (DESIGN) AND JOSHUA GORDON (PHOTOGRAPHY)
Arlo Parks has announced her third studio album, Ambiguous Desire, alongside the release of its lead single, 2SIDED.
The London-born artist dropped 2SIDED yesterday, marking the first taste of the new record.
Ambiguous Desire is set for release on 3 April, and we are buzzing.
Posting to Instagram, the Mercury Prize-winning singer-songwriter described the new album as the product of “2+ years of blood, sweat, tears, dancing hard and loving deeply.” She added that she pushed herself creatively for the project, explaining: “I challenged myself to write [the album] exactly how it felt, to strip everything down to what was essential, to be on some knife-edge energy.”
Her first single off the new album, 2SIDED, premiered on BBC Radio 1 as their hottest record. Arlo described the song as deeply personal, writing in an Instagram caption: “I really put the rawest part of me into this one…yearning + pop realness.”
Longtime fans of Arlo Parks will notice a clear sonic shift in her latest work. Speaking to BBC Radio 1, she reflected on how Ambiguous Desire departs from her 2023 album My Soft Machine, revealing that nightlife and nocturnal spaces heavily influenced the new sound.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time in nightlife spaces and nocturnal spaces, going back to listening to Underworld and Burial and just getting lost, especially in early 2000s Croydon post-dubstep music,” she said.
The singer also credited slowing down and taking time for herself with shaping the new record. “I had my first little bit of time where I could really sit and think about what this third record would look like – and it looked like living life.”
She added that besides sitting in the studio, she’d been “going out with my friends who are DJs, hosting more, learning to DJ myself. Just throwing myself into living life.”
“I’ve been doing this since I was 17, and this is the first time I’ve actually got to do that. It was just about being spontaneous. It’s what I needed.”
A new era is clearly loading for Arlo Parks, but if 2SIDED is anything to go by, it will be just as honest and emotionally rich as ever.
To celebrate the release, Arlo is set to play a string of intimate gigs across the UK, with details on ticket sales expected soon.
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