Arlo Parks

Hammersmith, and a first single at eighteen

Arlo Parks was born Anaïs Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho in London on 9 August 2000 and raised in Hammersmith, in the west of the city. Her heritage is Nigerian, Chadian and French, and she learned French before English. The influences she has named sit oddly together and explain a lot about the records that followed: Elliott Smith and Joni Mitchell for the songwriting, Radiohead for the texture, Sylvia Plath for the way words land on a page.

Her first single, Cola, came out in November 2018 through Beatnik Records, when she was eighteen. Two EPs followed in 2019, Super Sad Generation and Sophie, both of which built an audience around a particular method — small, specific domestic detail, half-spoken, with the melody held back until it mattered. By the end of that year she had moved to Transgressive, the label she still records for.

The record that defined the first phase

Collapsed in Sunbeams arrived in January 2021 and reached number three on the UK albums chart. Its title comes from a line in Zadie Smith's On Beauty, which is a fair signal of how literary the whole project was. It won the 2021 Mercury Prize, and the same year Parks took the BRIT Award for Best New Artist; the Grammys nominated her for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album. The timing mattered — a quiet, interior album about depression, friendship and adolescence released into a locked-down Britain found an unusually receptive audience.

The year after, she played the rooms that follow that kind of win, opening for Harry Styles, Billie Eilish and Clairo across 2022, and returning to Glastonbury more than once. My Soft Machine followed in May 2023, with Phoebe Bridgers guesting, and was a denser, more guitar-forward record than its predecessor. In September 2023 she published a poetry collection, The Magic Border. In 2024 she picked up a writing credit on Beyoncé's Ya Ya, which is the sort of line on a CV that tends not to be predicted.

Then she stopped. By her own account in interviews around the new album, she spent roughly two years as, in her phrase, a creature of the night — deliberately living rather than working, after a stretch of touring that had run continuously since the Mercury.

New York nights, and Baird's loft

The break is the origin story of Ambiguous Desire. Parks has described falling for Brooklyn, and for someone who lived there, after a 2024 tour date in the city, and then spending real time in New York clubs — Nowadays, Bossa, Basement. The research went further than going out: she bought books on club culture, looked at how communal rooms are built, and downloaded sets from Paradise Garage, the Manhattan club whose queer dancefloor she has named as the album's governing reference. Alongside it she has cited The Streets and Burial, which places the record somewhere between New York house and a specifically British kind of murk.

Most of it was made with the producer Baird, previously known for work with Brockhampton and Kevin Abstract, in his loft in downtown Manhattan, with Parks describing the sessions as experimenting and freestyling rather than writing to a plan. Paul Epworth, Romil Hemnani and Rob Bisel also have production credits. Sampha sings on Senses. It runs twelve tracks and about forty minutes.

The album was announced on 13 January 2026 with the single 2Sided, which Parks framed as a song about being hit by a bolt of desire and finding language for it. Heaven followed on 2 February, Get Go on 10 March and Beams on 31 March. Ambiguous Desire came out on 3 April via Transgressive.

Where things stand now

Commercially the record behaved like an independent release rather than a crossover one: number one on the UK Independent Albums chart, number thirteen on the main UK albums chart, number four in Scotland. Critically it did better than that. Metacritic settled at 77 out of 100, with Hot Press giving it nine out of ten on release day — Peter McGoran called it her best work and the sound of a writer at her most willful and vulnerable — Clash eight out of ten, Pitchfork 7.1 and Paste a B minus. The dissent, where there is any, tends to be about the production prioritising mood over the lyrical clarity that made her name.

Parks marked the release with a run of small UK record-shop shows from 2 April, starting in London the night before the album came out and taking in Leeds, Nottingham, Brighton, Kingston, Oxford and Southampton. The Desire Tour proper was announced on 6 March, with general sale on 13 March. A remix of Floette featuring John Glacier appeared on 4 August.

As of early October 2026 the North American leg is finished. It opened at the Howard Theatre in Washington DC on 29 August and closed at the Knockdown Center in Queens on 1 October, taking in Philadelphia, Boston, Montréal, Toronto, Detroit, Dallas, Austin, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, Salt Lake City, Denver and Chicago. The UK and Ireland run begins at Dublin's Ambassador Theatre on 17 October and includes O2 Academy Brixton on 20 October, Glasgow, Bristol and Manchester's Albert Hall before the 26th. Europe follows from 28 October to 2 December — Utrecht, Cologne, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Munich, Warsaw, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Zürich, Luxembourg, Copenhagen, Oslo — with Stockholm's Slaktkyrkan landing in February 2027.

The show as it is being played

The notable choice about this tour is the size of the rooms. Thalia Hall in Chicago, the Wonder Ballroom in Portland, the Showbox SoDo in Seattle, Mtelus in Montréal — these are clubs and mid-size theatres rather than the arenas the Mercury-era profile could probably have filled, and they suit a record built on low end. Baird, who produced most of the album, has opened on selected North American dates, including Chicago on 29 September.

Reviewing the Montréal date of 3 September for Atwood Magazine, Oliver Crook described Parks and two bandmates as silhouettes in fog under minimal light, with strobes on the dancing and long electronic passages stretched out between songs rather than a straight run through the album. The pivot of the night, in that account, was Black Dog played at the piano in a single spotlight before the set pushed back into movement. The through-line he drew was the shift from the isolation of Collapsed in Sunbeams to something collective.

The April record-shop shows were the opposite proposition and worth noting as a contrast: at the O2 Academy Oxford on 11 April, Parks played the new album front to back in about an hour with one guitarist, in a room kept almost completely dark. PhotoPitLive's reviewer wrote that the voice live had the same steadiness and closeness it has on record, which is the quality that has survived every change of genre around it.