The musician mentions lyrics from Bridgers’ song Motion Sickness (“I hate you for what you did / and I miss you like a little kid”) as a guide to her own emotional candour.
“I love the command that she has over her voice and the texture of her voice, and the way that she can just melt into any world, whether it’s a Kid Cudi song or a SZA song or a Taylor Swift song,” Parks says.
The two first collaborated in 2020 for a cover of Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees for BBC Radio 1 – their voices together are transcendent. Parks goes one step further by featuring one of her favourite artists on this record – on the dreamy Pegasus, she’s joined by indie heavyweight Phoebe Bridgers. “A big part of the experiences that I’ve lived have been soundtracked by a song, or feel very closely connected to a piece of visual work,” she says. On this record, she name-drops the prog-metal band Deftones on the lovestruck track Devotion, and uses the famous aquarium scene from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet as a metaphor for emotional distance on Blades. Robert Smith, Sylvia Plath and Twin Peaks all got a nod on Parks’ debut. Collapsed in Sunbeams took its name from a phrase in a Zadie Smith novel, and My Soft Machine from Joanna Hogg’s 2019 film The Souvenir. That’s true not only aurally, but also lyrically – Parks’ erudite prose is often referential, naming the books, music and artists that have given her world its shape. “The combination of different sounds you see is a patchwork of the things that I love … It’s very much what I’m loving through the prism of me.” “Having an approach to the second record that was very much ‘it can be whatever I want it to be’ opened me up to involving a few influences that I never really would have thought applied to my own music,” Parks says, naming Irish post-punk band Fontaines DC and ’90s British alt-rockers Placebo as reference points. There’s a sense of adventure that came with experimentation, and what Parks describes as tapping back into a “teenage excitement” about music. Musically, My Soft Machine adds new ingredients to Parks’ sound – she leans into crunchy guitars and expansive electronica, marrying her ethereal vocals with a new sonic palette. “That process of being in nature both with people and alone definitely gave me a new space to mull over lyrics and listen to demos, and get to a point where I felt like I had the patience to let a song reveal itself to me slowly.” “Any time I’m in a new context, it does shift everything a little bit for me – even just exploring the Californian wilderness and going on camping trips, learning beautiful secret little beaches with my friends and spending a lot of time in the mountains and in the woods,” Parks says. When she moved last May, she was in the process of making this record changing her surroundings helped to clarify the songs, which are awash in wonder as she draws inspiration from a new everyday world. Credit: Vince Aungīorn and raised in London, Parks relocated to Los Angeles in 2022 to be closer to her partner, the musician Ashnikko. With My Soft Machine, Parks says she tapped into a “teenage excitement” about music. She appeared on stage with Lorde and Clairo at Glastonbury 2022 to sing the former’s Stoned at the Nail Salon – a “very special moment” she counts as a career highlight to date. Her authenticity and originality has gained her a cult following which continues to build, and coveted slots at major festivals around the world. Parks’ youth belies the seriousness and maturity of her lyricism, which is as visceral as it is honest. “It felt really right to have that perspective shift.”
“There’s a really specific truth that comes from sharing parts of yourself, and sharing stories that have been really central to forming who you are,” she says over Zoom. On her second album, My Soft Machine, the 22-year-old born Anaïs Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho turns that observational eye onto her own complex inner life. Whether singing about helping a loved one through the fog of depression, falling in love with a straight best friend or observing strangers’ relationships, Parks introduced herself as a focused witness to the everyday minutiae of life, winning the prestigious Mercury Prize in the process. The English musician’s debut album, 2021’s genre-hopping Collapsed in Sunbeams, waded from indie pop and folk to jazz, R&B and soul, as she showed the world through her keen, soft eyes. Each of her songs unfurls like a world in miniature, alive with vivid imagery and emotions so raw you can feel their heartbeat. There’s an intimacy to Arlo Parks’ music that feels sacred. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size
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