Home Read Albums Of The Week: Arlo Parks | My Soft Machine

Albums Of The Week: Arlo Parks | My Soft Machine

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: Grammy-nominated, Mercury Prize and BRIT Award-winning artist Arlo Parks is returning with her second album My Soft Machine, a deeply personal body of work about Parks’ experiences as she navigates her 20s and the growth intertwined.

“The world/our view of it is peppered by the biggest things we experience — our traumas, upbringing, vulnerabilities almost like visual snow,” she explains. “This record is 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.

“There is a quote from a Joanna Hogg film called The Souvenir, it’s an A24 semi-autobiographical film with Tilda Swinton — it recounts a young film student falling in love with an older, charismatic man as a young film student then being drawn into his addiction. In an early scene he’s explaining why people watch films: ‘We don’t want to see life as it is played out we want to see life as it is experienced in this soft machine.’ So there we have it.”

The record follows Arlo’s critically-acclaimed and award-winning debut Collapsed in Sunbeams, a record which received Grammy nominations for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album, won the BRIT Award for Best New Artist, received the Mercury Prize, and won the BBC Introducing Artist Of The Year Award. Her debut album also reached the top three on the U.K. charts and won AIM awards for Best Independent Album and UK Independent Breakthrough.

On top of all this, Arlo was also nominated for Breakthrough International Act at the BET Awards, named the youngest high-profile supporter of UNICEF and an ambassador for the British mental health charity CALM. She has plans to continue her extensive work with both charities into 2023.”

 

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