Arlo Parks
Ambiguous Desire
TRANSGRESSIVE
Though vulnerability has become a bit of an overrated trait within the craft of songwriting, Brit-transplanted New Yorker Arlo Parks wields her sainted sensitivity as a sculptor does calipers and stylus in order to mold and manicure the finest, most defenseless details. And while her willingness—or necessity—to risk all in the name of open-faced truth was the greatest lyrical asset of 2021’s Collapsed in Sunbeams and 2023’s My Soft Machine, on Parks’ newest album Ambiguous Desire, it’s literally baked into its heartbeat—an aching groove where portraying poignancy through narrative is lifted to a new level courtesy of the ecstasy of dance music.
No more embellished in the production booth than previous albums (she’s long worked with a team of mixologists that start with Paul Epworth of Adele and FKA twigs fame), Ambiguous Desire has an elevated energy to its melody and rhythm, a sound that pursues and embraces pulsation as a metaphor for finding one’s sweaty center and that looses the toxins and endorphins within. While “Blue Disco” tackles the physical sensoria of the dance floor—good and bad—Parks reminds herself that real, honest rapture comes from within. That same inner life (and light) pours from “Beams,” despite the narrator’s self-doubts and distress, while the deeply emotional “2SIDED” shows off Parks’ needs to love and be loved through the haze of “sadness” that she “can’t shake.”
And although her third album’s title track revels in the fact that the club is the only true place where joy and community meet with satisfaction, Parks never deludes herself from knowing that such outer glow must start from within.
