Arlo Parks isn’t afraid of change or uncertainty. When the Brooklyn restaurant we meet at is closed two hours after its scheduled opening time, she adapts quickly. The dive bar next door — illuminated by a dozen vintage pinball machines — will do just fine. The 25-year-old settles into a corner table with an ice-cold seltzer and jumps right back into the conversation we had been having outside in the rain.
In a few hours, Parks is heading to see a play called You Got Older, an existential dark comedy playing at the Cherry Lane Theatre. “‘Tender and gorgeous,’” Parks says, quoting Time Out New York’s tagline for the show. She’s going into the performance mostly blind, as she often does with theater and movies. Hearing those two descriptors alone, she thought to herself, “That feels promising.” It’s an intimate production with only seven primary characters. Ambiguous Desire, the singer-songwriter’s third studio album, has it beat.
Parks namedrops three people on the glimmering opening track, “Blue Disco”: There’s Crash and Ames and Aleda’s cousin. On “Jetta,” she rides in her Volkswagen with someone in the passenger seat. They’re on their way to see Conor, and they all run into Cindy later. Maria, who passes through on “Get Go,” has been shaking off the shock of seeing her ex out with another girl. Later, on the Sampha-assisted “Senses,” Lae offers Parks a shoulder to lean on. Kelly is DJ’ing on “Heaven,” Joey is sipping beer on “2Sided,” and Danyiel’s voice buzzes through a phone speaker on “Floette.” Of course, Parks is the main character.
“Some of the characters are people in my life, or types of people in my life that have kind of flown in and out,” Parks says. “It does feel like those characters maybe only exist in that little world, especially when thinking about nights that happen, like, once a month. It’s like this person exists in this party and then just disappears.”
Her first album in three years, Ambiguous Desire, out on April 3, emerged from the musician’s deep immersion in nightlife, the community she found there, and the introspective lessons about life and love that she learned. In a way, Parks was making up for lost time after years on the road and an intense period of burnout. In 2022, while touring her Mercury Prize-winning debut Collapsed in Sunbeams, Parks cancelled a string of U.S. dates to return to London and try to recover. “What makes burnout feel worse is the energy and effort that goes into holding it together is being applied to that, rather than to actually making yourself feel better,” she says.
Del Water Gap was supporting her on tour at the time — and he was exhausted, too. “We had realized we were both lying to each other and trying to put on a brave face,” he told Rolling Stone in 2023 about the run falling through. Parks found her friendship with the singer-songwriter strengthened by the shared experience of not wanting to pretend anymore.
Parks also connected with musician Lucy Dacus, who similarly validated her decisions. “She was like, ‘I see you. You did the right thing. You chose yourself.’ That’s what feels really healing,” Parks says. “She opened her arms to me in that moment, and that’s when we started actually becoming friends.” Relocating to L.A. from London also proved to be a healing decision. “Being static for the first time in my adult life allowed me to build relationships with deep roots,” Parks says. “I’d always been that friend who wasn’t around, or that friend who was traveling because of the way that I was living.”
Ambiguous Desire gets deep into her mind. “I’d written this phrase ‘Desire is an engine,’ because I was just thinking about what it means to be alive and the things that drive us,” Parks says. “You can understand a lot about a person from their friends, the way they speak, and the things they care about.” The names help to create a sense of proximity, but they’re secondary to the confessions she couches in her verses.
“There are these moments that feel ecstatic, that are then followed by this real darkness,” Parks says. “I feel like it’s almost my duty to write it how it felt. That’s my mantra.” There’s a brief track on the album, not even two minutes in length, that dives head first into the uncertainty and vulnerability of opening up in order to fall in love. “’Cause you cut through me and that’s not a bad thing,” she sings. “Do you hate what you see?”
The song, “South Seconds,” is named after her current partner’s old Brooklyn address. Parks notes that there’s a recurring character, “The Lover,” that appears a few times, both in reflections on her own relationships and others that she has observed. In her mind, there is no good or bad love. It all adds up the same way. The fear and the lessons led her to where and who she is now. “I do truly feel like I met the love of my life,” she says. The relationship is still fresh, but Parks has already found that “it allows me the room for growth and to know that there is a bit of my core that is still me that will always be loved.”
Ambiguous Desire is fueled by platonic love, too. There’s a voice note she accidentally recorded while taking photos of her friends and another from someone who called her to check in, saying, “I miss when we’d do stuff together.” When Parks laid out her goals for the album with her producer and close friend, Baird, she had a clear vision: “I want to challenge myself more than ever. I want to be the biggest music fan that I’ve ever been. I want to be a student. I want to be really honest with myself in my lyrics and be honest about the music that I’ve been submerged in for the past few years.”
Parks committed to studying not only what it felt like to be moving in the darkness with a mess of bodies, but also what went into making it feel so electric and industrial. She fell down rabbit holes about how certain DJs got their names and the gear they used, or “how the experience of music changed if the booth was in the center, or if it was raised.” She sourced vinyl from flea markets and sampled the London pirate-radio adverts she found on them.
Parks even took up DJ’ing as a new creative outlet. It all added “a sense of cultural context” to the album, she says. Her girlfriend — a writer who understands the emotional and mental demands of creating — indulges her interests. The library they share at home is full of books about those same topics, and they collect records together. “There is this creative exchange that’s always happening,” Parks adds. “The environment that you come home to after the studio definitely feels like it nourishes you.”
But nothing compares to the first-hand experience of hitting the dance floor, or finding new friends in the smoking area. Parks spent a lot of late nights at staple spots in NYC, like Basement, Nowadays, and the now-shuttered Black Flamingo. Other times, she opted for a good old dive bar. They were always overflowing with characters and newfound courage. “I remember I had this night where I was like, ‘How did I end up here in this metal bar?’” Parks says. “And I’m, like, talking to this metal dude about him falling in love with another guy for the first time.”
Parks traces her nightlife origins back to Auntie, an underground party she attended in Los Angeles with a DJ friend a few years ago. “I felt this affinity to it immediately,” she says. “I spent so much of my life playing shows and it was about dark space, collecting music, the magic of that. I felt a weird kinship between that and going to shows and being in the club. There was something familiar about it.”
A few years ago, Parks settled into a bungalow-style home in Silver Lake. She lived alone, but she was rarely on her own. Every few weeks, she invited her closest friends over and encouraged them to bring along anyone they knew who similarly sought community. “L.A. can be lonely,” she says. “It just became this really beautiful community thing. People would come only once when they were in town, or would come every time. It became this little enclave of trusted folks who wanted to meet other good people.”
An attentive host, Parks often set the mood for the night with tea lights and special candles. In the background, she’d leave the Criterion Channel stream playing quietly on the TV. The other sounds that filled the room, other than the chatter of her guests, came from Parks and her friends spinning on her DDJ 200 DJ controller. On an ideal night, she serves natural wine and throws on Donna Summer, Blood Orange, and Solange records before everyone heads out to party. On the best night, she adds, they’d catch sets from Honey Dijon, Eris Drew, and Octo Octa.
“Seeing people dancing, connecting, and moving — and being the sonic curator of those spaces — has meant so much to me,” Parks says. She wanted Ambiguous Desire to feel the same way. “My first record felt really intimate, you sit with your morning coffee at your kitchen table and enjoy it alone,” Parks says. “And this feels like, ‘OK, everyone’s coming outside now.’”
Parks thinks of her previous releases as time capsules of who she used to be, but also proof that some things never change. “I still feel like the same person I was when I was 15 and I was doing this at home on my own,” she says. “I look back on those records really fondly. This is what my taste was. These were the people that I loved or that I was around.” When she looks back on this period of life, Parks is confident it will reflect exactly how she felt as it happened. “There is something quite magical about having documentation of my whole life by the time I get to my sixties, or whatever,” she adds. “I’ll still be making records, for sure.”
