Arlo Parks Shares Poetic New Single “Impurities” From Upcoming LP ‘My Soft Machine’
Sharing a second single from her upcoming album, Arlo Parks has released a calming and poetic new track titled “Impurities,” alongside a music video directed by Jak Payne.
Inspired by nights listening to The Beatles and SZA, as well as her love for ambient music, “Impurities” is an atmospheric track, largely drive by Parks’s crisp, clean vocals – which ironically seem to have no impurities – and a steady beat driving the song along. Parks shares: “This is a song about community… being around people who make you feel like your inner ugliness and failures and mistakes don’t matter, who lift you up and make you laugh, who make you feel good and clean.” It’s a soulful song, feeling just as safe and warm as the community at the heart of the lyrics.
About the conception and making of the video, Parks says: “With this visualiser I really wanted to convey this atmospheric oscillation between solitude and companionship – I wanted to show how being around your people really does feel like coming home. When I was writing this song I had been thinking about Gus Van Sant a lot and how he captures people in all their fragility and beauty and ugliness – Jak [Payne] was instrumental in creating/protecting that sense of softness.”
About her upcoming sophomore album, Parks shares that “the record s life through my lens, through my body – the mid 20s anxiety, the substance abuse of friends around me, the viscera of being in love for the first time, navigating PTSD and grief and self sabotage and joy, moving through worlds with wonder and sensitivity- what it’s like to be trapped in this particular body.”
My Soft Machine follows her highly-praised debut album Collapsed in Sunbeams, which received two Grammy nominations for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album, won the BRIT Award for Best New Artist, received the Honda Mercury Prize, and won the BBC Introducing Artist Of The Year Award. My Soft Machine is set for release on April 26, 2023 via Transgressive Records.
Live Dates:
3/26 – Manchester, UK @ BBC 6 Music Festival
7/5 – Tokyo, Japan @ Ebisu Garden Hall
7/6 – Osaka, Japan @ Umeda Club Quattro
7/8 – Seoul, South Korea @ Musinsa Garage
8/5 – Oxfordshire, UK @ Wilderness Festival
8/26 – Reading, UK @ Reading Festival
8/27 – Leeds, UK @ Leeds Festival
9/5 – Dublin, Ireland @ 3Olympia Theatre
9/14 – Amsterdam, Netherlands @ Paradiso
9/15 – Brussels, Belgium @ Ancienne Belgique
9/17 – Berlin, Germany @ Huxleys Neue Welt
9/19 – Milan, Italy @ Alcatraz
9/21 – Paris, France @ L’Olympia
9/28 – London, UK @ Eventim Apollo
