Ambiguous Desire

This Friday Arlo Parks will release her third album, Ambiguous Desire, and, having heard it in advance, I can assure you it's a truly excellent work. The singer-songwriter has said she drew inspiration from "the idea of desire as a kind of engine that drives action: everyone feels alive because there's something or someone they desire." Beyond the title, though, the word "desire" appears only once across the whole record, in "Nightswimming", which opens with a confession: “I got this desire in me/ I just wanna leave it all to/ yesterday, yesterday, yesterday”. And it's no coincidence that the album's key concept surfaces in this particular song. The desire Parks sings about burns at night and on the dancefloor. The whole record lives and pulses at night, from dusk to dawn, and it's around the strobe-lit dancefloor that most of the action in "Ambiguous Desire" takes place. On this, the artist has said: "When I was in those kinds of nighttime spaces, I felt that the desire for connection was something I couldn't escape. There's something really special about the brief glimpses of intimacy you experience on the dancefloor [...]. I think the record has a certain fluidity, shifting and ambiguous, that really reminds me of the strobe lights and the glow of those nighttime rooms I was in."

For an album about dancefloors and clubs, Parks inevitably looked to electronic music, and in particular, she says, Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead, Joy Orbison and Burial, as well as rave culture and the legendary venues of New York nightlife, where she spent a great deal of time. Cinema, though, also had a major influence on the writing process: Wong Kar-wai, Robert Altman and Taiwanese and French films accompanied Parks daily while she worked on the songs. It's no surprise, then, that the singer-songwriter has said she pursued an almost cinematic compositional style, as if she were scoring a film that hadn't been shot yet. And indeed, the visual quality of these nighttime encounters and events comes not only from the narrative brushstrokes of the lyrics, but also from the sonic density in which they're wrapped.

The hedonism of parties and nights out is mixed on “Ambiguous Desire” with an undefined pain that resurfaces and is shared, sweated out, amid glowing lights, synthetic radiation and energising beats. During breaks, tobacco is rolled and smoked outside the venue in the moonlight, and conversations strike up with strangers while, through the wall or below ground, the basslines keep rumbling on. “It's an album full of contrasts,” reveals Parks, “because I really tried, quite intentionally, to create a bittersweet mood, with light and shade, in the way the music is put together. I think there's always a certain sweetness or tenderness in my voice, and in my poetry too, but I wanted to build in a discrepancy between the themes and the big, muscular drum sounds, the more abrasive synths and a different rhythm within the music."

“Ambiguous Desire” isn't just a record of contrasts, though: it's also a collection that reveals the complexity of emotions and relationships even as they become entangled within a setting that seems, on the surface, freer and more liberating. From the very first track, “Blue Disco,” desire coexists with hardship – romantic or everyday – unleashing a vital energy that's mirrored in a rich, enveloping and damnably addictive sonic universe. Once you're out on the dance floor, there's no way to stop dancing: “Heaven,” “Nightswimming,” “2SIDED” could keep going until dawn and we'd never want them to stop.

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