Arlo Parks

Arlo Parks (born Anaïs Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho on August 9, 2000) is a poet, singer, and songwriter from Hammersmith, West London. Of half Nigerian, quarter Chadian, and quarter French heritage, she grew up in a multilingual household and learned French before English.^[1] Her father introduced her to jazz (Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Aretha Franklin) while her mother played Prince, 80s French pop, and Diana Ross. The collision of those influences shaped a musical sensibility that has always been harder to categorise than it first appears.

A pivotal moment came around age thirteen, when she discovered King Krule's music and felt, for the first time, that guitar-driven songwriting could carry the kind of emotional weight she associated with poetry. She has cited Elliott Smith, Radiohead, Joni Mitchell, and Sylvia Plath as formative influences, alongside poets Nayyirah Waheed and Hanif Abdurraqib.^[1]

Her debut album Collapsed in Sunbeams (2021) won the Mercury Prize, with judges praising her singular voice and her capacity to connect deeply with her generation.^[3] She was 20 years old at the time, one of the youngest recipients in the prize's history. The record was characterised by intimate acoustic arrangements and confessional lyrical detail, establishing Parks as a voice for the particular loneliness of early adulthood.

Parks is openly queer, and has been described as blazing a trail for Black queer musicians in British mainstream pop.^[2] Her second album My Soft Machine (2023) deepened the confessional approach of her debut, earning sustained critical recognition.

Her third album Ambiguous Desire (Transgressive Records, April 3, 2026) marks a significant evolution in her sound. Over 2024 and 2025, Parks immersed herself in club culture across Los Angeles, New York, and London, dancing in underground spaces where, as she has described it, she could be whoever she wanted to be on that particular night.^[4][5] The result is a body of work that grafts her poetic, emotionally intimate songwriting onto breakbeat rhythms, modular synths, and club-oriented production, retaining her lyrical voice while expanding the spaces it occupies.