Arlo Parks (Transgressive Reccords)
South London singer-songwriter Arlo Parks’s second album confronts listeners with a perennial music question. How similar can two albums be before they’re too similar? Her debut work, Collapsed In Sunbeams, was a triumph of the thinking person’s soft-indie. She put personal, poetic lyrics front and centre and backed them with muted synth beats. It’s a sound that saw her win the 2021 Mercury award for album of the year and earn three Brit award nominations. And her new work is pretty much the same – poignant lyrics, with an occasional dip into slightly more musically adventurous production. Parks’s new songs don’t feel like a progression from her debut, but her formula is enjoyable enough to justify it.
Photograph C Brandon/Redferns
