Her debut became a pandemic smash and won the Mercury prize. But after her schedule left her ‘dangerously low’, Parks cancelled shows to prioritise self-care – and the love story behind her fizzing new album
Driving along the mountain-flanked Angeles Crest Highway in southern California, Arlo Parks played her new album for her girlfriend for the first time. A sunny, spacious record fizzing with the promise of new love, she wanted it “to throw people off balance a little”. The couple turned off and parked the car, music still playing as they looked out over the city of Los Angeles, the singer-songwriter’s new home. “She loved it,” says Parks.
LA is a long way from Hammersmith, London, where the 22-year-old performer born Anaïs Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho grew up and wrote her first EP, 2019’s Super Sad Generation. The tenderness and candour of Parks’ melancholy bedroom pop gives it a quiet power, a quality that has propelled her steady ascent. Her breakout hit, Black Dog, a delicate heartbreaker about bearing witness to a close friend’s debilitating depression, became an unofficial anthem of the pandemic, then, in 2021, her debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, was lauded in this paper as “the arrival of a major new talent”. It won her the Mercury prize; Billie Eilish told Vanity Fair that Parks was one of her favourite artists and invited her to open for her at her concerts in London. Parks spent 2022 travelling the world, playing shows with Harry Styles, Lorde and Florence + the Machine.
