On Ambiguous Desire, Arlo Parks makes a credible case for herself as a different kind of artist – then occasionally undermines it with the very thing that made her famous.
The pivot is real: after a muted reception to My Soft Machine, she spent two years in New York clubs, absorbed Larry Levan and Kelly Lee Owens, and returned with a record built on breakbeats and garage rhythms. What she hasn’t resolved is the relationship between her voice and this new sonic territory.
Producer Baird, known for his work with Kevin Abstract and Brockhampton, builds the album on hypnotic percussion loops, modular synths, and a low-end that on the best tracks is genuinely physical. ‘Heaven’ – drawn directly from a Kelly Lee Owens DJ set beneath a Los Angeles bridge – is where this fully lands: a heavy pulsing bassline, a dense atmospheric wash, Parks’ falsetto doing something unusual and sitting within the track’s texture rather than floating above it. The bass doesn’t relent and the mood doesn’t break. Most of the record sits at a lower temperature, shimmering rather than driving. On the back half, ‘Luck Of Life’ and ‘Nightswimming’ are atmospheric and beautiful, but Parks’ voice drifts across the top of the mix without pressing into it, and the momentum built in the first half quietly disperses.
The writing, though, is sharper than anything Parks has done before. Where her debut reached for poetic abstraction, Ambiguous Desire goes specific: Maria stands there holding both her heels, sequins on her jeans; someone’s cousin is sick out the back of a party; Joey DJs while quietly drinking a beer. These figures are drawn with a novelist’s attention – named, physical, briefly and precisely real.
‘2SIDED’ – Parks outside the club while her friends are inside, carrying “a sadness that she really can’t shake” – is the album’s clearest emotional image, the garage beat pressing forward while the lyric stays still and you feel the gap between them.
‘Beams’, written about numbness and the specific fear of being a burden, is the one moment where the dancefloor metaphor falls away. The production turns trip-hop dark and the voice is close and quiet, but its placement mid-album makes it feel like an interruption rather than a pivot. Sampha on ‘Senses’ fares better as a pause, his voice alongside Parks’ offering tonal contrast the single-register surrounding tracks lack.
Closer ‘Floette’ was written first and placed last as a deliberate arrival. Over a slowed breakbeat, Parks repeats a melodic motif until it settles into something like acceptance, and the album’s queer arc from ambiguity to blossoming is emotionally legible even when the mid-album pacing softens it. The irony is that the title describes the album’s central problem as well as its subject: the desire to move bodies and the desire to be heard are in mild conflict throughout. Ambiguous Desire doesn’t resolve that tension so much as inhabit it gracefully, and when Parks commits fully – ‘Heaven’, ‘2SIDED’, ‘Get Go’ – the result suggests that the album this one promises is still to come.
