Arlo Parks - Ambiguous Desire

By the time most people are 25, they’ve already had a few years of being gloriously anonymous. Bad nights, great nights, the sort of stupid, formative freedom that feels throwaway while it’s happening and oddly sacred once it’s gone. Arlo Parks never really got too much of that. She was too busy becoming Arlo Parks, the Mercury winner and certified Generational Voice. ‘Ambiguous Desire’, then, feels like the sound of someone finally getting to slip the harness for a bit, only to discover that the person waiting on the other side was herself all along.

That makes it more interesting than the easy line, which is that this is ‘Arlo’s dance record’. It clearly lives in and around club music, of course. The pulse is stronger, the shapes blurrier around the edges. There’s a sense of songs built for bodies as much as bedrooms. But the real shift is subtler than that; Parks hasn’t stopped being an observer; she’s just stepped into the frame.

This is the sort of pivot that usually comes with a press release about ‘artistic evolution’ and a new haircut. It’s a move people make when they want to announce growth with a capital G, but Parks is too careful a writer to fall for that. ‘Get Go’ is still doing the thing she has always done best, catching a whole world in a handful of details, while ‘South Seconds’ aches in that specifically Arlo way, all half-light and afterthoughts. ‘Beams’ is one of the strongest things here because it refuses to tidy itself up. It hurts, and it says so without asking for a medal.

The club-facing production matters because it changes the pressure points around those feelings. ‘Heaven’ opens up some space, while ‘2SIDED’ has a real sense of lift to it, but not the sort that tries to flatten everything. Even at its most physical, ‘Ambiguous Desire’ is not all that bothered about becoming some hands-in-the-air reinvention fantasy. Parks still sounds way too curious for that. She remains drawn to the bit before the surrender, and the bit immediately after.

That, really, is the album’s trick. A less distinctive artist might have treated these sounds as a licence to become less like themselves. Parks uses them to get closer. To desire, certainly, but also to uncertainty, queer joy, relief, guilt, self-possession: all the things that get a bit louder once you’re moving.

If there’s a reservation to be had - and it’s a picky one at best - it’s that the album’s vibe can sometimes feel so well curated that songs occasionally sink into its glow instead of cutting their own shape. A bit more mess might have made the whole thing hit even harder, but that isn’t to say it doesn’t hit hard enough as it is. It’s a small, not-even-really-quite-a-complaint against a record that understands exactly what kind of transformation it is making.

Not a lunge for relevance, nor a brand-level relaunch, it’s an album far more convincing than that. For years, Arlo Parks made music that felt like a private thought catching the light. ‘Ambiguous Desire’ keeps that intimacy, but lets it out into the night. And, as it turns out, it looks very good there indeed.