Sensitive soul is learning how to strut with the stars

Arlo Parks

My Soft Machine

(Transgressive) ★★★★✩

As with her debut, the first track on Arlo Parks’s second album opens with some spoken word scene-setting. On Collapsed in Sunbeams in 2021, she was found feeding a cat and slicing artichoke hearts. Here, on Bruiseless, “The person I love is patient with me, she’s feeding me cheese and I’m happy.” So little has changed.

The 22-year-old west Londoner still seems most content at home, finding poetic joy in tiny details of domesticity. But in the bigger picture, everything’s different. She’s now a Brit and Mercury Prize winner who has supported Harry Styles and Billie Eilish, living in LA with her pop star girlfriend, Ashnikko.

The lifestyle change proved a bit much for someone whose music had revealed her to be a quiet, sensitive soul, trying to help a friend through depression and longing for her straight best friend in her early singles. In September last year she cancelled a number of US tour dates for mental health reasons, writing: “I am broken and I need to step out, go home and take care of myself.”

However, while mature listeners will have little sympathy for her plight on Purple Phase, where she sings that she is “terrified of turning 24,” for the most part My Soft Machine sounds happy. The Nineties beats of Pegasus, featuring Phoebe Bridgers on chorus, sounds loved up. On Weightless she’s singing about a relationship that has seen better days, but the spongy synths and bright chorus make it the closest she’s come to pure pop.

Her first album would have been called trip hop in a different decade, and often her gentle lyrical brilliance was blurred by the tasteful backdrop. Here she pushes her sound in a few new directions with great success. Devotion unveils a great grungy guitar in the memorable chorus. Puppy has a stranger sound, gradually dissolving in a haze of alien synth noises.

Generally the feel is summery, well suited to her Californian existence. And whatever her circumstances, she still describes them beautifully.

The Nineties beats of Pegasus, featuring Phoebe Bridgers on chorus, sounds loved up