Neu Introducing Arlo Parks

It’s Arlo Parks’ 19th birthday and, as the occasion dictates, she’s got a prosecco in one hand and a slice of Colin the Caterpillar in the other. But that’s about where the similarities end between the rising young star and most people her age.

Recently signed to Transgressive Records following the release of last year’s breakthrough single ‘Cola’ and its following EP ‘Super Sad Generation’, the musician’s blend of nuanced, observational poetry and smooth bedroom beats straddle the line between youth and something far more timeless. Case in point, recent single ‘george’ – a lilting summer jam that riffs on cad-about-town early 18th century poet George Byron and transposes his womanising ways into a modern playboy who woos ladies by playing MF Doom.

“Books and words were always my refuge,” she explains. “I was quite a loner when I was younger, and if there was a story with people who were super popular and going on adventures, then I’d read about it and feel like a part of it.”

Taking up poetry-writing at the start of her teens, Arlo soon also picked up a guitar and began writing songs, cribbing influence equally from the wordsmiths that informed her increasing literary passions and a series of “really intense genre phases” of musical love. “I totally had my emo phase,” she laughs, “and I was super into really hard rap as well. I say that to people and they’re like, ‘But you make the softest songs?!’ It’s like, yeah, but everything I listen to, I take something out of it.”