POP MUSIC
Getting to know singer-songwriter Arlo Parks.
The first time I heard English singer and poet Arlo Parks, she stopped me in my channel-surfing tracks.
“I had a dream. We kissed and it was all amethyst,” she sings coolly in the first line of the sigh of a song called “Eugene,” a beautifully detailed sketch of adolescent obsession. “Amethyst,” after all, is something that doesn’t come up all that much in contemporary pop music.
But it isn’t just word choice that makes “Eugene” memorable. Over a spare groove, 20-year-old Parks evokes the pain of the unrequited, youthful love for a childhood girlfriend who’s in thrall to someone else. “Seein’ you with him burns. I feel it deep in my throat. You put your hands in his shirt. You play him records I showed you. Read him Sylvia Plath. I thought that that was our thing.”
And “Eugene” was no one-off. Throughout 2019 and 2020, Parks dropped a series of singles — the downcast “Super Sad Generation” (whose refrain “We’re the super sad generation, killing time and losing our paychecks” seemed oddly prescient for these times), the slinky “Sophie” (in which she “bends to the punch, then pretend that I’m fine, when really I’m crushed”), the pleading “Black Dog,” in which she struggles to bring joy to a depressed friend (“I’d lick the grief right off your lips”), a stark cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” and several others — that showed her inspiration wasn’t sporadic.
Now, Parks has just released her first full-length album, “Collapsed in Sunbeams,” and it generally lives up to the promise of what has come before. Though occasionally, as in “Too Good,” she forsakes her lean, folky, jazzy, hip-hop-influenced indie style for something more stridently pop, the songs still quiver with doubt and desire. “You quote Thom Yorke and lean in for a quick kiss,” she sings. “But still you won’t just admit that you like me.”
After the bitterness of “Eugene,” the album’s best track is “Caroline,” a sketch of a relationship in a state of collapse in public. “I saw something inside her break. Everybody knows the feeling. Suddenly he started screaming, ‘I swear to God, I tried … Caroline.’ ”
In “For Violet,” she finds herself up against a father’s disapproval of her relationship. “He would always act so sarcastically charming. Wonder if he realized how much he hurt his kids.”
But it’s not all heartbreak and breakups. In “Hurt,” she tells the tortured protagonist of the song, “I know you can’t let go. Of anything at the moment. Just know it won’t hurt so. Won’t hurt so much forever.”
And “Hope” manages to live up to its title. “You’re not alone like you think you are. We all have scars. I know it’s hard. You’re not alone, you’re not alone.”
It all makes for a welcome introduction to a performer whose work stands out from that of many of her contemporaries, even if some of her best tracks — such as “Sophie” and “Super Sad Generation” — didn’t make the album.
Parks is part of a new generation of young, female singersongwriters — Courtney Barnett, Mallrat, Phoebe Bridgers among them — channeling a unique point of view into a particularly personal form of pop music. For someone who, according to her Spotify profile, claims to have spent most of high school “feeling like that Black kid who couldn’t dance … listening to too much emo music and crushing on some girl in her Spanish class,” “Collapsed in Sunbeams” is bittersweet redemption.