“Sometimes there are songs you listen to where you just have to sit down in silence for a few moments and think back to the beauty that you’ve just beheld. It rarely happens but when it does it feels like you’re being hit with a wave of emotions and soon after you’re left feeling cathartic. That’s Arlo Parks.”
Back in 2019, before the whole pandemic happened and we were locked away for the foreseeable future, I wrote this about Arlo Parks. From the moment I heard her sound I was enamoured. She could capture the most delicate of human emotions and transform them into a halcyon piece of music that finds a home within your subconscious. You insert yourself into her poetic words, making her music feel like it was written specifically for you and no one else. She’s only grown from there, going from small gigs to selling out everywhere she goes and being nominated for countless awards.
Now our gushing over her is done, lets talk about her latest drop Blade. 2023 has seen Parks expand her sound further, venturing into the electronic realm with mellowed beats littering the production, adding a groove that’s hard to ignore. Lyrically the track discusses the end of a friendship and the opportunity to attempt to rebuild it. Imagine you’re at a party, you see someone you haven’t seen for years, you’re trying to pluck up the courage to say hello and eventually you do. This is a song that soundtracks that.
I fully expect to see this in the next season of Euphoria, as it’d kind of be perfect for it, but it won’t be the last we hear from her this year. Her album My Soft Machine will be released May 26th and it’s gonna be more than worth a listen.
“Paul is just a wizard; he has this childlike spirit that I’ve always really loved and he brought that to Blades. I wanted to make something that I can dance to, finally, because I feel like my songs don’t really have that quality in general. So, I took inspiration from bands like ESG, artists like Kaytranada, and a lot of the kind of 70s Zambian psychedelic rock that I love.”