How Arlo Parks Found Inspiration on the Dancefloor & From ‘North Star’ Lorde

Perhaps it’s the jetlag, but at times, there’s an enjoyable maziness to conversation with Parks. Settling back on a cushioned window booth and cradling a black coffee, she declines to order breakfast as she tells a waitress that she’s in a “flow state”, diving deep into the process behind her third LP, Ambiguous Desire (due Apr. 3 via Transgressive Records). In an already-sumptuous back catalogue, the new album is another cut above: muscular and danceable in a new way for her, pulling from ambient techno, digital textures and trip-hop. 

“I had a really clear sense of what I wanted this record to be,” says Parks. “The more that I talk about it, I think people will understand that it’s exactly where I’m meant to be. It’s important to take risks – it wouldn’t make sense if I was trying to make the same record over and over.”

At 25, Parks is in the most stable phase of her life so far. Eight years ago, she dropped her debut single “Cola” to low stakes. Yet within 18 months, she’d won the approval of virtually every possible tastemaker: a Glastonbury slot came calling; she won the BRIT Rising Star award; Phoebe Bridgers covered Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” with Parks on piano and harmonies. 

The accolades continued stacking up. 2021 saw the release of Parks’ debut album Collapsed In Sunbeams, a triumph of soulful spoken-word and left-field pop, which was launched via an Amazon Music film and went on to win the Mercury Prize. This outsized success was effectively a trial by fire for a young artist that was only just starting to find their footing in the industry, though Parks now describes it as a “mountain that sometimes felt unscalable.”

Her second record My Soft Machine followed in 2023 to a positive, albeit more muted response. In the year leading up to its release, Parks spent much of her time settling into West Coast life and a relationship with pop star Ashnikko (which ended in early 2024), having cancelled a string of US tour dates to protect her mental health. She alluded to this challenging period throughout the album track “I’m Sorry”: “I’ve been working incessantly / But that won’t keep the wolves at bay / I’ve been working incessantly / Like a wasp, feeling trapped and crazed.”

Parks says today: “I was still a teenager understanding her place in the world and what I was doing and who I was. I feel really sympathetic with that person, for sure. It’s kind of beautiful to look at your younger self and be like, ‘I was so confused, but actually I was on the right track.’”

Ambiguous Desire is an album that aches and pulses with tenderness. For Parks, it represents “the first time” she has been able “to embrace stillness” since she was 17. Recorded and produced in New York alongside her close collaborator Baird (who has previously worked with Brockhampton), the record was born from an extended rest period for Parks, during which she experienced clubbing and the restorative effects of truly letting loose for the first time.

The 12-track effort is full of wide, sprawling arrangements that segue from hushed and contemplative to liberated. Opener “Blue Disco” embodies the sweat, spit, ice and lust of Lorde’s recent Virgin LP, while the humid and sultry “Jetta” – which features Parks’ finest chorus to date – fizzles with the anticipation of untold adventures after dark. “2SIDED”, with its pretty, tightly-wound, metronomic beat, also keeps up this brisk pace.

On the flip side, the album also alludes to the wondrous, even frightening emotional epiphanies that come with the realisation that one’s life has started to take a different direction than planned. More subdued tracks like “Get Go” depict the frisson of new love and laying truths bare, with Parks’ variously disconsolate and upbeat delivery keeping us guessing as to her true feelings.

“I spent a lot of time listening to really weird club deep cuts and picturing myself there,” says Parks. “But I had never really been to a club or been immersed in that world before; I didn’t have time as I was starting out in music and I also didn’t go to university. But there was something about the repetitiveness and vastness of those sounds that really drew me in.”

Back in LA, Parks says she became a regular at events thrown by the Midnight Lovers Collective, who host a monthly underground soirée to a soundtrack of house, disco, and techno. In between making new friends with DJs and producers from across the globe, including the Dirty Hit-signed Kelly Lee Owens, Parks would meet “all kinds of surreal characters” both on the dance floor and in the smoking area. 

Some of these conversations, which would go on to inspire elements of Ambiguous Desire’s thematic content, took place with older queer ravers, people who “were experiencing a resurgence in their 50s or 60s and found safety in the club,” as Parks puts it. To her eyes (and ears), these people were living proof that the thrill of the night, the magic of connection, didn’t fade with age. 

A new perspective that Parks gleaned from these exchanges was to “control the controllables”, and learn to set stronger boundaries when it comes to her work schedule. She recalls “feeling very sensitive towards perceived failures or facing up to big opportunities”, particularly in the summer of 2022, when she was in the midst of a festival run alongside supporting Billie Eilish at The O2 in London, as well as Harry Styles at Wembley Stadium.

It is the latter experience that endures as a turning point. “I remember feeling like a tiny little ant on that stage and thinking, ‘How do I hold my own up here?’, Parks says, slowly recoiling in her seat at the memory. “I had to overcome a lot of nervous energy and show up for myself. I think it’s easy to be intimidated in those spaces where so many people are watching you.”

After opening up at one of Eilish’s shows, Parks hopped in a car to head 200 miles west across the country to the Glastonbury Festival site. The next day, she made a surprise appearance on the Pyramid Stage with Lorde and Clairo to perform a soul-stirring rendition of the former’s song “Stoned At The Nail Salon,” the pinnacle of “a weekend spent really pushing myself”.

Even though, four years on, she looks back at that busy period with empathy for her younger and often overwhelmed self, from the chaos grew a close friendship with Lorde, who Parks sees as a “North Star” in her life. When it came to drawing up ideas for Ambiguous Desire, Lorde was one of the first people that Parks called. Over the phone, the pair discussed books and the vivid, strange, half-remembered things they’d seen in their dreams that week.

“I think that she represents what it means to be free and truly yourself,” says Parks, when asked to describe the kinship she shares with Lorde. “I’ve always really admired her. I sent her a few of the songs [on Ambiguous Desire] along the way, just to see what she thinks. She’s always been really encouraging of me; she’s so wise and radiates this incredible level of self-possession.” 

2026 marks a soft reset for Parks. She seems galvanised when discussing plans to take the new album on the road, following the success of a recent run of intimate shows in London, LA and Brooklyn dubbed ‘Sonic Exploration’, which saw join Baird to play in the round and remix some of her earlier material. Ambiguous Desire sparked a fresh sense of purpose in Parks; she hopes these songs will “surprise” people.  

Away from music, meanwhile, Parks has been on something of a personal mission. She travelled to Sierra Leone two years ago as a UNICEF Ambassador, and has since visited some London schools to engage in poetry and mindfulness workshops with young people. These experiences have lingered on her mind, resulting in an album that often draws on the curiosity, hope, and humanity she encountered on each trip. 

“Creativity can be truly intuitive and playful,” Parks says. “You can follow a spark and maybe discover something unexpected along the way.”