UK singer-songwriter Arlo Parks is one of our favorite new artists of recent years, and after being named a WXPN Artist to Watch on the strength of her 2021 album Collapsed In Sunbeams, she’s returning this year with her third LP, My Soft Machine.
The album will feature her single “Weightless,” as well as a Phoebe Bridgers collaboration called “Pegasus” — Bridgers was an early supporter and collaborator of Parks — as well as “Impurities,” a newly-released single that touched down this week. The song boats that cool fusion of hip-hop and emotive pop that Parks does so well, and is paired with a music video set on rotating sets of domestic scenes, spinning in 360-degree foggy rooms for a particularly moody and dreamlike effect.
In a lengthy press statement, Parks describes the new album thusly:
“The world/our view of it is peppered by the biggest things we experience – our traumas, upbringing, vulnerabilities almost like visual snow. This record is life through my lens, through my body – the mid 20s anxiety, the substance abuse of friends around me, the viscera of being in love for the first time, navigating PTSD and grief and self sabotage and joy, moving through worlds with wonder and sensitivity- what it’s like to be trapped in this particular body. There is a quote from a Joanna Hogg film called The Souvenir, it’s an A24 semi-autobiographical film with Tilda Swinton – it recounts a young film student falling in love with an older, charismatic man then being drawn into his addiction – in an early scene he’s explaining why people watch films – ‘we don’t want to see life as it is played out we want to see life as it is experienced in this soft machine.’ So there we have it… My Soft Machine.”
My Soft Machine releases on May 26th via Transgressive Records, and can be pre-ordered here.