Arlo Parks – Ambiguous Desire

Arlo Parks’s third studio album, Ambiguous Desire, feels like the cinematic drive home after the club – windows down, thoughts unspooling, and the city glowing just enough to matter.

Across 12 tracks, the London-born artist leans into electronic textures, trading the sparse intimacy of her earlier work for sounds leaning more towards expansive, club-lit, and euphoric. The result is a record suspended between movement and stillness, where dancing becomes both escape and confrontation.

Opening with Blue Disco, a steady drumbeat carries a sense of nostalgic optimism, as if soundtracking the first scene of a coming-of-age film. That feeling bleeds into Jetta and Get Go, where the dancefloor emerges as a central motif, like a place to dissolve, perform, or momentarily forget. Intricate, pirate-radio-inspired production underpins Parks’s signature soft vocals, capturing the push and pull between holding onto a fleeting connection and losing yourself within it.

Halfway through, the illusion of the dancefloor as an escape route begins to crack. On Heaven, the lyric “I wish I had the language to tell you the way this feels” nails that tight-chested feeling of having everything to say and no way to spill it out. She’s experiencing something intense and consuming, but can’t quite translate it into anything tangible. Beams takes this even further, sitting in the uncomfortable space between knowing and doing. “I know it’s the right thing to do, but I don’t wanna / I feel it all / Nothing at all” is repeated almost like a loop you can’t break out of, and paired with the descending piano, it feels like a slow, reluctant sinking into consequence rather than a decisive moment of change.

From here, the record leans fully into vulnerability. Time becomes one of the album’s most persistent threads – warped, stretched, and revisited from different angles. As well as nostalgia, it also feels like an immediate kind of longing, like the urge to stay suspended in a feeling or a person, before reality inevitably catches up.

Sonically, Parks builds a hazy world of psychedelic flickers and punchy basslines. Even when the tracks blur together, it just deepens the dreamlike pull. 

By the final songs, there’s not really a neat resolution, only a lingering sense of becoming. Parks lets her questions around love and timing sit in their ambiguity. The album feels less like a conclusion and more like being caught mid-thought. Dancing, turning, and trying to hold onto something you already know won’t last.

Dionysia Afolabi
Image: Joshua Gordon

Ambiguous Desire is released on 3^rd April 2026. For further information or to order the album, visit Arlo Parks’s website here.

Watch the video for Get Go here: