Arlo Parks has announced her debut album Collapsed In Sunbeams, will drop on January 29th via Transgressive Records. Along with the news, Parks has shared the single “Green Eyes,” featuring backing vocals and guitar from Clairo. From Arlo Parks: “This is a song about self-discovery, self-acceptance and adolescence. It is supposed to uplift and comfort those going through hard times.” The single is accompanied by a Louis Bhose directed video.

Growing up, Arlo Parks struggled with her identity a self-confessed tom-boy who was super sensitive and “uncool,” she says it was like “I’m a black kid who can’t dance for shit, listens to emo music and currently has a crush on some girl in my Spanish class.” By the time she reached 17, she shaved her head, figured out she was bisexual and produced/wrote an album’s worth of material.

Growing up in South West London, half Nigerian, a quarter Chadian and a quarter French, Arlo Parks learned to speak French before English. A quiet child, she’d write short stories and create fantasy worlds, later journaling and then obsessing over spoken word poetry, reading American poets such as Ginsberg and Jim Morrison and watching old Chet Baker performances on YouTube. These days she references Nayyirah Waheed, Hanif Abdurraqib and Iain S. Thomas as her favorite modern poets, and it is clear that their works are as influential on her song-writing as any musician. Books too, such as The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. Parks says, “the way Murakami writes in that book is how I aspire to write my songs; gritty and sensitive and human.”

Fela Kuti‘s Water No Get Enemy and Otis Redding‘s Sittin On The Dock Of The Bay sound tracked Arlo Parks’ childhood, but it was aged around 13 that she discovered King Krule; an artist who would heavily influence the music she writes today. Later listening to more hip-hop (from Kendrick Lamar, MF Doom and Earl Sweatshirt to the more confessional sounds of Loyle Carner) and rock (Jimi Hendrix, Shilpa Ray and David Bowie), as well as the subdued, pained sounds of Keaton Henson, Sufjan Stevens and Julien Baker, Parks explains, “I would write stories so detailed you could taste them, while maintaining the energy and life of the hip-hop I loved.” There’s a visual, almost cinematic quality to her writing too, which is born from her love of horror films, streetwear and abstract art.

Arlo Parks
Collapsed In Sunbeams
Transgressive
January 29, 2021

1.Collapsed In Sunbeams
2.Hurt
3.Too Good
4.Hope
5.Caroline
6.Black Dog
7.Green Eyes
8.Just Go
9.For Violet
10.Eugene
11.Bluish
12.Portra 400