Arlo Parks’ Mellow Gold

The 20-year-old singer is making some of today’s best neo-soul.

THE 20-YEAR-OLD poet and singer Arlo Parks started releasing music as a teenager, courting blog interviews in between her final exams. Parks, who was raised in London by Nigerian and Chadian-French parents (her full name is Anaïs Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho), released two EPs in 2019 to critical acclaim. Just before the pandemic hit, she was set to go on her first tour. Instead, she has been stuck at home, waiting out this nightmare like the rest of us. “It’s given me some time to reflect and get used to spending more time with myself,” she says. ¶ She used the year to finish her debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams. It’s a lush and expansive project with a patient vulnerability at its core; Parks’ songs about love and regret flutter like memories stamped into your mind. ¶ “I wanted to delve into the past and the idea of reckoning with difficult things and celebrating the joyful things, to honor the stories that have made me who I am,” she says. “I took all of my journals that I’ve written over the years and all my folders of poems and worked from those.”