In interviews, Arlo Parks comes across as soft-spoken; chatty without being impolite. The British singer-songwriter’s discography up until this point has adopted a similar identity. Parks sang gently, like a friend whispering in your ear, without being too intrusive or emotional. Even when entering knottier subject matter (unrequited love on ‘Eugene’, a friend’s drug abuse on ‘Purple Phase’), the sonic textures were still sun-dappled and pleasant. Crucially, Parks’ voice—soaring and sweet—remained consistent across each story she told.
‘2SIDED’, her newest track, muddies those waters. Gone are the hushed affirmations of her early work; Parks, in a huskier, world-worn tone, croons of a nocturnalised anxiety that fascinatingly foils her usual spring-ready sound. The story is a familiar one of alcohol-fuelled yearning, propelled by a sweaty, shimmering dance instrumental indebted to, as Parks describes, LCD Soundsystem and the “queer hedonism of NYC’s Paradise Garage.” Modular synths and cut-up voices weave in and out of Parks’ bruised timbre to sketch a blurry portrait of this particular night.
Often on her first two albums, Parks spoke in vague descriptors that, while lovely, served more to window-dress than add to the story being told. On her debut album’s closer, ‘Portra 400’, for instance: “Boiled blood star shifts in the window of my eye / You smell like burnt hibiscus.” However, here the language is no less transportive, but less obliquely flowery—as though Parks is chronicling these thoughts in real time, in all their drunken viscera. “I feel my heartbeat climb,” she panics over galloping 808 thumps: “The moonlight cuts through, white / My friends are all inside.”
‘2SIDED’ works simply because it marries Parks’ innate storytelling skill with a more complex sound, one that’s darker and more ambiguous. The track is the first taste of Parks’ third record, fittingly titled Ambiguous Desire, which will be out on 3rd April via Transgressive. If ‘2SIDED’ lacks the proper catharsis it seems to simmer towards, perhaps this tension will be carried over and resolved in the album itself. Or maybe that lack of resolution is the point; desire, especially queer desire, must often boil without clarity or conclusion, remaining insular.
Words by Archie Marks
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